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friend's mind would quite really come to be on your mind too for the moment, so much so that, far from being frustrated by his unburdening, you would be fulfilled and sublimated. You would walk away from the conversation with the lightness of heart and the exhilaration that you feel when you have parted with a still-good suit at the St. Vincent de Paul's poor center. They say that many of the best marriages grow out of a girl's determinedly listening to what is on the fellow's mind, as if it were on hers — listening, as it were, to all his problems in the hope of someday becoming one of them! Actually this is exactly what happens when we submerge what is on our mind and sacrificingly, unselfishly, listen and comment on what is on another's. In this way, we become almost necessary to the other, we become a most valued friend to him. The urge to have a willing sharer of one's problems is so great in mankind that you can attract almost anyone with Polonius' "hoops of steel," if you sympathetically soak up his problems. You must do so judiciously, of course, and graciously, so that the talker feels that both of you have shared each other's troubles, not that he effusively spilled his own troubles unilaterally. A saint who is in full sympathy with the problems of others will have this judiciousness and grace, as a gift peculiar to his saintliness. But what about the rest of us who are not saints, who still have too much of the old Adam in us to give up our share of the conversational pie? |
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