Let's put the Coffee Aside...

Someone decides to pour out their heart to you, dumping all that goes on in their thoughts onto your shoulders. They ramble about how depressed they are and how they just wish they could disappear. You hear every word they say, maybe some of it escapes your thoughts, but you retain most of what they explained to you. They close their speech with broken tears and rub their eyes. You chuckle and stand up. Your hand touches their shoulder as they look up to your grinning face. “Hey,” you say, “don’t worry about it. We all feel like this sometimes. All you have to do is forget about it and move on.” Then you walk away and get in your car. Maybe you decide to grab some Starbucks on the way home.

You don’t realize what you left behind you. When you stepped into your car, that same person continued their cries, much louder than they were before. People walking near the building gawk at the person and then casually walk away as nothing happened.

Fact is, that person’s heart had been shattered. It was already broken while they were speaking to you, but it fell into millions of pieces when you said those three sentences. They feel like an idiot, so stupid that they thought they could put their trust in you. They feel used. And all the while you’re drinking your Starbucks, this person is crying out in agony for someone to mend their soul.

Okay, now I bet you’re wondering what that story has anything to do with listening. Think about it. Someone pours out their hearts you. You hear what they say and say something in response, but that particular response only injures them further. While you were sitting in front of them, thinking to yourself “I really need some coffee”, they were breaking up inside. They trusted you with the thoughts of their heart and spilled their guts in front of you. And you said “Don’t worry about it, okay? Shoot, it’s 3 o’clock. I need to go get some coffee…” Again, I’m telling you to think about it. You did nothing wrong, right? You gave them a word of encouragement to try to cheer them up. You listened to their ramble. So you did nothing wrong. Heh, a word of encouragement is not wrong. The last sentence of what you said was. “All you have to do is forget…” how many times do we say that to ourselves? Probably many. But fact is, forgetting isn’t going to help it. It’s putting a band-aid on a gushing wound.

In order to help someone when they are consoling you, you have to make a choice to listen to their hearts and not their words. Listen to their emotion. That person cracked down in tears at the very end of their explanation. Something pained their hearts. And all the while you chose to think that you really needed to get home or that you needed coffee.

A person is far more valuable than your coffee. Put yourself in that person’s place. They made a choice to talk to the likes of you because they thought you would listen. You both had to make a choice, and the choice is the most difficult part of a conversation. Choosing to ignore them and saying “forget it” isn’t going to help someone who could be mortally wounded. Be a doctor for your friends. They need your comfort, so make the choice to listen to them when they need you. There’s even people out there who aren’t exactly your friends, but some of them are going to open up to you. You are the key to helping someone else survive. And give them a hug too! Let them know that they are loved, that you will always be there for them to tell them that they’re not alone. Put aside your coffee. Put aside even your work, if the situation requires it, to speak out to your friend and find out what they’re going through.

Now choosing plays a major factor in a lot of things, but this section is only for listening. Will you not only start listening, but will you start choosing to listen to their hearts?

Taking the Time to Listen

Listening to a person drone continuously on about a subject can be boring. We have all had instances where we tune out what the person is saying because we simply do not care at the moment. We are too busy thinking about what else we need to do today and if we will have time to get our fix for caffeine on the way to the next item on the list.

We race from one task to another, telling people that we will talk to them if they make it fast and simple. However, we are not really listening to the words that they are saying, the feelings in their voice, whether or not this subject means a lot to them. We brush it off and continue on with our lives, with what we want to do.

Conversations, that used to fill up entire afternoons are now filled with quick, short-handed messages that often are shallow and never delve into the deeper topics of life, or they do and we do not completely listen to the whole problem. Then when a problem escalates, we wonder where it all went wrong.

We often want to blame the person, saying that they never told us about what they were going through. However, the opposite is true. They told us, we were not prepared to listen. We were not ready to receive what they are saying. By not being able to receive their words, we are also not understanding what they are saying and therefore are less effective when giving advice.

While just even taking the time to listen can be a problem, it’s relating and trying to understand where people are coming from that is another challenge. While there are situations where we cannot relate to others on and all we can do is hug them, there are times when we can offer advice when we have gone through a similar situation.

However, those conversations are disappearing from our daily lives. With all of the technology that we have these days, it make it easier for us to disconnect with people and be friends from afar. We may want to care, but our hearts need to be there to listen so that we can open up and understand others.

Will you open up to start listening to others?

Begin Again

When writing about thoughts of the heart, you are forced to look at yourself in a way that is often uncomfortable. There are many skeletons hiding in our biggest closet, the heart that we often do not want to confront because of past horrors that often leave us scarred forever. We do not know how to deal with them so we bury them and hope that no one knows.

However, we go back several years later, they are still there. What we often do not realize is that they have held onto us for so long that we accepted them as normal. Our hearts are both our most precious and terrifying thing; we are both afraid of it and want it to feel good at the same time.

We often do not feel good most of the time. That is because we let the problems of our past get in our way in a bad way. Instead of dealing with the pain, we want to forget about it. However, it often ends up controlling our actions and leads us to very dangerous stunts that most of us regret. We often think that in order to lead a better, happier life, we have to forget about what happened to us in the past.

That is not the case. Your past is what makes you the person you are today, it strengthens you and points out your weaknesses so that you can improve them. By shoving away your “skeletons”, you are also ignoring the lessons that you could be learning.

It is hard to accept, but it is the truth. You cannot grow from an experience if you are not willing to find the answers. You have to search for them. On this blog, you are looking for answers in different thoughts. You are trying to discover different sides that you may have never thought, or thought about and discarded it as irrelevant at the time.

There will be times when a topic will hit too close to home and it is up to you whether you will confront the issue or skip over it, shove it aside, and bury it once more. There are people that think that they are doing themselves a favor by pushing it aside, but it is far from that. It is hurting your already broken heart more. If you cannot pick yourself up already, where else will you go?

Instead of thinking of each topic that comes too close for your comfort as a constant reminder of your hurt, think of it as an opportunity to begin again. “Take my hand and then, We can find a new beginning, Let's begin again, While there's still time.” —Ray Boltz’s “Let’s Begin Again”. It is time to begin once more, to find a path that will help us instead of hurt.

Thank you for reading; I hope you find this helpful.

~Yuki

A Thought's Beginning

"'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked. 'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'" – Lewis Carroll in his Alice in Wonderland. The way of life goes, all things have to start at a beginning, including little things like this blog. A novel needs a writer to place those first few words onto the paper. A building needs a construction worker to erect its walls. Homework assignments need a student to solve that first problem. Everything has a beginning, and eventually, an end. I imagine everyone has felt the relief when they finished that last problem on their homework, knowing that they could participate in whatever they so pleased. Sure, we all continue to receive more tasks on our plates, but that’s why they call the first time the beginning. After the beginning, well, you’ve got the middle and it keeps adding up.

Where am I going with this? I bet that’s what you’re wondering. This blog is now the beginning of exploring the thoughts of a heart. Things will start to unravel, questions will be asked, discussions are permitted, and I most welcome anyone who wishes to comment. Dive in with me, don’t bury your head in the sand, everyone has heard thoughts of their own heart. The heart of each person varies since no one is the same as another person. We all have our pain, whether emotional or physical, I don’t know, and that pain leads to certain thoughts, thoughts of which I call thoughts of the heart. It’s okay that you have questions. If there is something on your heart, something that you want explained, feel free to speak up and tell me that you want me to explain a certain topic to you. I will not ignore you. No one should feel out of place because their opinion differs from mine or yours.

A beginning has come with a path to explore. You are welcome to stay and see where our journey ends up. You are also welcome to turn around and say that this is stupid. I won’t mind. I won’t stop you. Thank you, my readers, for taking time to read through the beginning of my little blog. :)

~ Raine