Alain de Button another gem to store away

Subject: Alain de Button, another gem to store away

I have often said that to find pleasure, information and above all education you have to search around and try many outlets. Be it food and a different cuisine (I'm not so good at that) or girlfriends (I'm certainly not so good here) be it entertainment or enlightenment you have to stretch out and sample what's available and not only drink at the same water hole.

I'v just finished watching a program on RT where the philosopher, Alain de Button was describing his exploration into the human psych regarding empathy and love between two people. It was a fascinating program tenderly teasing out the problems and opportunities in life long relationships which it seems the main ingredient is communication. Setting out your thoughts and desires and listening to your partners thoughts and desires, not as we usually do, by making assumptions but what are our goals, yours and hers and how do you see the route to attaining them and importantly will your  paths converge or diverge along the way.

If at the beginning of the journey we interrogated those goals and set out guidelines on achieving them instead of relying on amorphous assumptions bound up in  love and lust we would have a better framework to work with, in what's a difficult complex story. Our lives at a point in time were caught up in the awareness of each other and of our having some sort of acceptable continuity based on a route which was acceptable to both. Better to thrash out the route and the destination before setting out but of course this  relies on courage and honesty and importantly, overcoming the fear of destroying the relationship with too much information about your own dreams and your own inadequacies.

Communication is not about winning but explaining where your thoughts and opinions come from and for that to happen you must have a receptive ear to hear the objections, too many objections and you better back off because it's hardly likely to improve over time as a blame game emerges over virtually everything.

In a corporate meeting minutes are kept to hold the decisions of the meeting and in this a marriage councillor or psychologist who listens and reiterates points of agreement amongst the disagreement is crucial.

Listening to Alain Button was a rewarding experience but so is listening to someone trying to unravel the economic and political chaos in this country or the lifecycle of a penguin. All exposure to new knowledge is good. Some of it is relevant to our lives but much is peripheral, unless of course we wish cultivate our minds to know more and in my world knowledge is imperative to keep the brain ticking over.