SHOWING UP DUMB
In relationships, both romantic and plutonic, but more often romantic, we tend to lessen our level of listening over time as we get more ‘comfortable’.
We HEAR our partners but we don’t neccesarily LISTEN…
I think this arises because we sometimes reach a point where we have subconciously ‘created’ our partners in our minds. We don’t have the ‘stress’ or ‘excitement’ hormones which strive to impress them by hanging off their every word and showing our best self…. we feel we know them, we feel we know what they will say, what they stand for, what they are thinking or how they will react. In a way we are unwillingly taking them for granted & not perceiving them as being able to grow from what we know them as. To put it more metaphorically, it’s like we are freezing our perceived version of them in time, on some Demolition Man shit.
This can begin to cause problems when a partner communicates discomfort or concerns with the relationship or speaks about how they are feeling & expresses new needs… We hear it but we don’t listen, like really listen. We hear them through our own lens or filter; our own self creation of that person and how we perceive them. It’s like we’ve stopped exploring our partner, our curiousity depletes and we almost fill in the gaps ourselves to what we think we hear.
We stop receiving our partners in a way, and once we stop receiving, we stop giving. One cannot be without the other for a long duration. Eventually the scales will tip and the balance will be thrown off.
So what do I do with this?
There is a beauty in showing up ‘dumb’ in life. By this i mean showing up not wrapped up in your ‘knowing’ but showing up completely open to discovery, fully living into the value of curiousity.
Imagine opening your mind and heart to your partner constantly, never assuming, never locking into one stagnant vision of them and conciously renegaging with the person infront of you.
There is power in spending the time to deepen our understanding of each other throughout the relationship, a constant, ever evolving road, not just a front loaded, gather all the information early on then shut the doors scenario.
We all grow, change, evolve and have shifts in perspective and thinking… so if we could remove that freeze frame thinking and engage with each others flow, we would truly grow together.
Otherwise it’s as if we almost get desensitized to them and life itself.
On a broader scale, it’s easy to fall into this trap in how we show up in life… we know what we know and accept that as enough, often thinking we know more than we know and rarely sparing a thought for what we don’t and the reality that we don’t know what we don’t know… make sense?
To me, being desensitized to life resembles a life without curiousity. I want to embrace the discomfort of not knowing and strive to know more, with the ultimate knowing that I will never know enough and that’s the beauty of it.
Here’s to showing up dumb 🙏