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DAVID BENTLEY'S WEEKLY COLUMN |
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REMEMBERING WHAT YOU SAID
The phrase "remembering what you said" has many connotations. As we age, those unavoidable senior moments occur; and there are many things that we temporarily forget, including what we have said. At various times when we choose to not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we get tangled in our own lies by forgetting what we have said. However a good friend recently told me about another aspect of this phrase. With the clarity of simplicity, my cohort stated that a true friend is someone who remembers what you said. It took a while for that concept to sink in, and I’ve thought about it often since hearing it, but it is spot on. It takes good listening skills to remember what someone said. Good friends listen to us well because they are interested in what we have to say and care about us. They want to know us better, so they listen to what we don’t say as well as what we say. They believe that what we say has merit. They take in our words and think about them after our conversation ends. Sometimes they even remember what we said after we’ve forgotten it ourselves, and that can be most helpful when we start to veer off course or are struggling to make sense of new situations. Having someone remind us of what we said can be like listening to an old entry in an audio diary. Because we remember what our friends have said, it is easy to pick up a true friendship where we left off the last time we were together. It is as if we were never absent from each other. We know our friends as well as, or perhaps even better than, we know ourselves. Yet we don’t judge or condemn them. We’re simply good at remembering what they said.
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