How much time do you think you spend talking each day?
Out of the 24 hours in your day and night, how much of that time is spent with just you talking? Not including pauses or the other half of the conversation. How much of that time is just you exchanging your own thoughts?
Let’s see.
I wake up. Do my whole morning routine and drive to work. This process takes up the first 90 minutes of my day. Not a single word is said.
I’m at work. I sit at a desk for eight hours straight. I say hello to people as they walk in, and I occasionally chat with my coworkers. I’d say during my shift, There’s probably an hour of things being said by me, of thoughts being expressed. And that’s generous.
I come home, and for the next hours until I go to sleep, I talk to my mom and my sister. I spend more time out of my day talking to them than anyone else, so I’d say that there’s a maximum of 90 minutes of nonstop spoken word by me after work.
I then sleep for 7 hours. Zero thoughts outwardly expressed, despite dimension traveling in my dreams.
When I count it up, it looks like I’ve got a little over 2 hours of consistent thought sharing out of my day. What am I doing for the other 22 hours? Keeping my thoughts to myself? How many thoughts run through my mind in the 22 hours that I spend not saying anything?
Let’s put it like this: a ton.
And this doesn’t just apply to me. Most people spend an overwhelming majority of their day silent.
How many of your thoughts are shared? How much of your mind are you able to reveal on a daily basis through dialogue? How often do you even get the chance to express what’s on your mind?
Think about what your stream of conscious generally sounds like. What are you paying attention to? What are your thought processes like? Notice that everything you think about, you think about relative to you.
Even if you’re not directly speaking on something relative to you, your perspective on things is relative to you. Your perspective is based on your experience as You.
Now that you understand how much time you spend in your own head, apply that to everyone else.
Every person spends most of their time inside their own head. Thoughts bouncing off of each other, bouncing off their perspectives, bouncing off their personal experiences, bouncing right back off of each other.
Think of someone you know. Anyone.
Now, try to imagine their stream of consciousness for the ~20 hours they don’t spend talking.
It’s hard, right?
Knowing how much is going on in your head, and in others’ heads, and knowing how little is shared makes you wonder how we’re even able to communicate when our minds are so different.
Somehow, we communicate fine. Sometimes, we communicate too fine. To the point where we take outside thoughts and allow them in our own stream of consciousness to continue to bounce around in our heads, relative to our perspectives.
This is called taking things personally.
We all do it.
It’s kind of crazy to think about: someone has their own stream of consciousness going on in their mind, and basically any conversation we have with them is just little blurbs of it. When we hear the little blurb, we allow it into our stream of consciousness, free to intermingle with our thoughts and bounce around like one of our own. We let it roam free, and we even allow ourselves to interpret it relative to us.
This is so funny because knowing how personal our stream of consciousness is, why would we think someone else’s has anything to do with us? Even when you perceive other people, you perceive them relative to yourself. And when others perceive you, they perceive you relative to themselves.
Even if someone is directing their speech at you — about you — it’s still part of their stream of consciousness that’s relative to them.
It has absolutely nothing to do with you.
When you hear someone’s thoughts being expressed, keep in mind that you are lacking decades of context.
People’s words, feelings, and thoughts are a reflection of themselves only.
There is no need to apply someone else’s thought process to yourself.
Don’t let your feelings get hurt.
Have a blessed day.
