The importance of having a good listener
A few minutes later, sitting in front of the vet, I listed my well-decorated list of complaints about my dog's health: the itching, the sporadic coughing and vomiting, the fungus on her paws, the gas and a ruminating manner that didn't suit the species. I even had a little movie to illustrate the latter. While she diligently wrote down my complaints one by one in the medical records, I watched her curls of gray hair in disarray, her tired look and a certain air of boredom, like someone who is used to listening to stupid complaints. Suddenly, something caught her attention in my report, and she exclaimed with amusement, "You two have shared custody of Suki!". This wasn't the case, but she finally made sense of my list of whining and decided to start over from scratch, now putting the symptoms in some kind of order and relationship.
As I watched the pleasure of a job well done emerge on the vet's face, bringing her out of her state of apathy, I realized that I had finally found a good vet for my dog. After explaining to us all the possible causes of the symptoms we had been reporting and the strategies she would adopt from now on, she leaned back in her chair with a dreamy look on her face and began to tell us stories about her childhood. I don't know how we got to that point, but before long I was laughing listening to her stories, and my mother was joining in with an amused and attentive look. I was already regretting the fact that I couldn't record our conversation to use as inspiration for a short story later on. I wouldn't be able to reconstruct the story of the moment when, at the age of twelve, she started her father's motorcycle for the first time with a hairpin and repeated the sequence of gestures needed to start the bike, gestures she had seen her father do countless times. And then she would invite her friend over the intercom for a ride through the streets of the neighborhood, waving proudly at the municipal guards and neighbors who were gawking at the scene.
We've all heard about the importance of having someone around who listens to us. When we recount a moment from the past, we relive, to a certain degree, the pleasures and pains we experienced during that time. As my mother and I left the vet's office, I realized that in the one and a half hours we had spent there, not only had my dog been attended to, but the vet had also felt re-energized by recounting her childhood memories and was now preparing to end her exhausting working week and return home.
Unfortunately, although most of us love to be listened to, not everyone has the patience to listen to other people's stories. Especially when what the other person has to tell is whining. In this case, each listener develops their own techniques for dealing with this situation: from making it clear to the other person that they have no interest in continuing to listen to the complaints, or directing their full attention to String Theory or some other mystery of quantum physics while their companion continues to rattle on. I had a manager, who was deaf in one ear, who prided himself on having developed the perfect technique for these situations. At night, when he and his wife lay down to sleep, his wife had the bad habit of starting to whine about any and every problem until she finally turned off the light and slept like an angel, while he rolled around in bed sleepless for hours on end, tormented by her problems. This routine was repeated until the day he discovered that if he went to bed with his good ear to the pillow, he would become immune to the whining session and sleep peacefully.
Everyone knows how to deal with their own limits and the kind of relationship they want, but what I wish for you is that you have a good listener by your side. Have a good week!
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Voltar