Do you love to have deep conversations about life, death, emotions, relationships, sex, love, darkness, the nature of all things? Do you get easily bored with chit chat, the superficial social exchanges that are formally called a conversation but carry none of its trades except voicing words? A conversation means an exchange – of information, ideas, feeling, stances, experiences, concerns, joys and in this exchange both ideally are better after the conversation than they were stepping into it, even if it was a fight or an argument.

What the superficial conversations lack is truth. Their words are just empty symbols, noise filling in the silence with no meaning behind them, no meat on their vowels and consonants, and exposed to enough of such conversations you’ll begin to not listen because there is nothing worth listening to. Some of us have never really learnt to listen but are just waiting for the other person’s mouth to close so we can say our own thing and consider it a war zone where the one who wins is the one who manages to convince the other side he’s right, or we’re trying to impress, or we’re seeking for confirmation, or are hungry for attention, or have some emotional baggage with a person that is preventing us from really hearing them… due to all of those and a sea of reasons more, we forget or never learn to listen, but I mean really hear what is behind the words. Listening is learning, about you, others and the world. If you heard 9 “irrelevant” things and got one you didn’t know out of the conversation is a very good return on your time. You’ll get a bit smarter from the benefit of others vantage point and experience and therefore less likely to make some stupid mistake that would drain you time and energy.

Listening in truth with no aim to win or fight, speaking truthfully what you really think, feel, need, want, being for the person even if you’re against their arguments, the truth of an exchange like this is the fundament of relationships and mental health. Truth serves as an anesthetic to the hardships of the world and the exchange of truth is crucial to keep away the degeneration of reality. If you have no truth within a relationship – personal, business, educational, relationships with friends, authority or any other you have no relationship, only the playing out of pathological scenarios in which no one is listening to anyone. This goes nowhere, it’s a dead place. So learn to listen and speak truthfully. To do so you’ll first have to do the hardest task ever and that is align all of your inner tectonics. Only then can you be honest and speak your being forward, and really listen to others doing the same. That is a conversation.