What’s the most underrated life skill?
An angry throng en masse; the phenomenon of a sound shadow; and whatever became of Marc Anthony?
When does something that isn’t a skill rise to the standard of a skill? When everyone stops doing it!
Now there went a can of worms that just exploded. And what might that proverbial can have contained? For starters: school systems teaching fundamentals instead of questionable civics lessons; people having real conversations instead of safe, over-edited, vanilla bullshit; the noticeable absenteeism of common courtesy due to mindless scrolling; parents free to act as parents so inmates stop running asylums; and last but not least🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁(okay, that was a lame drum roll): listening! Indeed, that long-forgotten attribute that involves ears doing more than manufacturing wax.
We’re so far apart socially and politically that even an innocuous approach to a topic feels like an attack, and so we stop listening while we prepare our counterattack, which typically excludes any attempt to build a bridge or to see the world beyond our own arrogance. And what is the result of something that was once a well-practiced social grace, now elevated to a seldom-practiced skill? Both ancestral wisdom and novel ideas die in darkness, shouted out of existence by “we” who forgot how to listen. The scarecrow needed a brain, the tin man needed a heart, the lion needed some courage, and we need a good pair of ears, so we have something to lend poor Mark Anthony. And since we’re on the subject, does anyone happen to know a good wizard?
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