One good thing that has started happening since I have started writing a post every day is that the reactions to a post typically provide me with the idea for the next day’s post. That way, I don’t have to tax my brains too much for the next dose of inspiration. Following this pattern, a friend and me were discussing about yesterday’s post wherein he mentioned that though I said that love can happen more than once, it was very difficult to find someone worth loving. I asked him about what he looked for when he looked for “someone to love”, so to speak. The main thing that came out of the discussion that followed was that it is not always about romantic feelings or physical companionship. What he really craved was simply having someone to share his feelings with, someone to just sit down and talk to.

Now that struck a chord with me. Not just because I love to talk, but also because I believe that one of the most important factors in any worthwhile human connection is the ability to share your thoughts, experiences, fears with the other person. And as I have observed, the most effective way to this is by – you guessed it…talking to each other. When you find someone with whom you can talk what you can’t talk with others, you’ve found the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Do your best to hold on to it. 🙂

Now, why is talking so important to us, especially when it comes to forming close connections with people around us? Forget for a moment cliches like “Man is a social animal” – the fact remains that we all have a basic need to express what we think. What follows is this is the need for an audience, but not everything we think/feel is intended to be shared with all and sundry. This is where the need for a “listener” to whom we can talk freely comes in the picture. Secondly, talking to someone, especially about something close to your heart, is an act of opening up to that person, and trusting him/her to understand you. And when you do that, you automatically form a connection with that person unlike any other. In that sense, I believe that talking your heart out to someone is more intimate a gesture than a hug or a kiss. I speak this from experience – if someone shares with you what they cannot or do not share with anyone else, consider yourself special. You mean a LOT to them. Do all that you can to deserve that privilege.

And just as talk can be used to share your feelings or to foster companionship, it can also be used as a cloak to hide your true colours or to mislead/manipulate someone. NEVER do that to anyone – you will only end up generating a lot of bad blood in the end. Broken trust is the most difficult thing to repair. If you feel that someone is doing it to you, the simplest way out is to take your time to trust people. No one is going to judge you for taking a while to trust people, as long as you trust the right lot. 🙂

For talking to be worthwhile, what matters the most is “listening” (not “hearing”). You need to be a good listener, if you seek the privilege of having someone to talk to. However, I will keep that for another post. For now, I will wrap up things here with a line I read somewhere, and which sums up my thoughts on this very effectively – “When you don’t talk, there’s a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said”.