Sunday, December 25, 2011

People in the Room

You have a reputation for being a "smart ass."  It's probably deserved.  But you aren't always a smart ass, sometimes you actually speak from the heart.  But you have a long and winding history with the People in the Room.

So you're talking.  This is not unusual, you are known to be a "talker."  And often you talk from the "top of your head;" you don't refrain, don't bite your tongue, no, you are an expert rambler, the words spill out like warm beer, and sometimes you can go into a dizzying hyper-drive where you build whole cities and towns with your words.


Not every word counts.  Sometimes you speak just to speak, and you run with the stream of words just for the hell of it.  But this time, in this room with these people, it wasn't like that, no, you had had a recent "insight," a moment of clarity, and it had seemed to you to be profound and enlightening, it  had lit up the dark recesses of your own little existence, and you were speaking to the People in the Room and trying to convey something of this clarity and to get them to see an important and life-changing insight that they could use too.


And as you spoke you could see the doors and windows in their heads closing.  The People in the Room figured you were just talking, and what you had to say was just one of those smart ass rambles, and they pretended to listen, but they were checking out, sinking into their own thought-chambers and letting your words fall like dead leaves, they just fell to the floor useless, lifeless, and unheard.


Your "insight" was not coming across at all, it was just a feeble little thing, a little pile of useless and crumbling dead leaves, sitting there on the floor.  And everyone in the room, looked away and pretended that they weren't there.  Finally even you had to kind of brush them into a tidy pile.  This particular insight was not to live in that room.  It was a shiny little gift that just would have to fend for itself.  Untouched.  Un-given.