The quiet

I guess it's all relative.

There's some new people living around the lake. While walking the dog I happened to run into a few of them. Nothing like a sunny weekend day for getting people outside. With all the visiting it took three and a half hours for a two mile walk.

One guy asked, “What do you hear?”

I wasn't sure exactly what he was going for. I could hear the guy with a leaf blowing moving sand out of his driveway from a about a mile away. A quarter mile away I could hear people talking around their outdoor grill. Two fishermen were chatting in the boat on the lake. A woodpecker was banging away in the distance. There was a truck moving along the road two miles away and I could hear his tires crunching on the gravel. Someone's dog was barking out there somewhere.

While I was listening to all the sounds the guy answered his own question.

“Nothing. You hear nothing. It's quiet out here.”

Sounded kinda noisy to me.

Then I remembered he just moved up from a city in Rhode Island. Compared to a city it is quiet. One more reason cities drive me nuts.

-Sixbears

Social skills

At one time most people had to learn how to get along with people who were not like them. It was pretty common to have to interact with people you might not have liked at all. It's a basic skill, but too many don't get a chance to develop the talent.

Thanks to the Internet it's now possible to connect with people who think like you. No matter how unusual your particular interests may be, there's most likely a bunch of people out there in the wide world doing the same thing.

Even when fulfilling our day to day needs it's possible to avoid people we don't like. Don't like the guy at the bank? Do your banking on-line. Hate the clerk at the local store? Order your stuff from Amazon.

Don't like what they say on the 6 o'clock news? There are sites on the Internet that will tell you whatever it is you want to hear.

The problem is that you lose the social skills needed to get along with people. It pays to know your neighbors, even if they don't have the same political views as you and favor Star Wars over Star Trek. When something bad happens, everything from natural disasters to social unrest, being able to work together is a huge survival advantage.

Maybe a little more effort should be made to find common ground with our fellow man. We are all sharing the same planet.

-Sixbears