Tell me new things
She said to me, “Tell me new things”.
We say things, talk, converse, gossip. Among friends, with a friend one-to-one, with our dear ones, with colleagues in workplace and with numerous other people like the shopkeeper, fellow traveler, bus conductor, doctor and so on.
Usually I couldn’t talk to unknown people about anything other than the immediate need. Some years back things changed. I still remember an evening when strolling on the sidewalk I entered a small watch repair shop to adjust the band of my wrist-watch. The man on the counter had a bandage on his forehead. While he worked on my watch I started the conversation, “How did you get the injury?” And he started telling the story of his hurt as if he was telling to his friend. I reciprocated and the tale continued. Coming out of the shop I felt a glow. The warmth of holding the hand of another human, a stranger. Did we talk of new things?
What do we say? Usually? With old friends we revive old memories, live in them. Gossip as in the olden times…projecting ourselves, imagining ourselves as twenty year olds. Pure adda, pulling legs, telling anecdotes, cracking jokes…time passes. We bask in the warmth of companionship. There is the hard cold lonely world outside. Do we say new things? Deep things? Exhilarating things?
We shield our inner thoughts. The thoughts that are personal or disturbing or for that matter thoughts that we think deeply when we are alone. We play safe. We touch the surface of the water, do not dip our hands in, let alone submerge.
At home, in daily life we flow with time. We do not stand still and think. We react in expected fashion, known ways as with time we get adjusted to the thoughts and actions of our near ones. Do we say new things? Routinely?
At work or with colleagues, talks get work-centric. If you are in finance, you talk of finance. If you are in media, you talk of media. Oh yes you also talk of politics, of cricket for sports minded and of doctors and illnesses if you are not so well.
Being thinking machines, we cannot but think. Occasionally we get a new perception, a novel idea. After assimilation, we desire to tell it to someone who will understand. Rebuke, rejection or passive reception still will hurt the old thinking machines, however impervious they might have become with age and experience.
I hesitate. Highly probable, my new thought is already old with the other one. For that matter, what can a new thought be! Specially when out of 7.5 billion thinking people, whoever can think, thinking hard all the time.
Day in and day out, with our dear ones, colleagues in workplace and friends we talk of daily needs, immediately visible things, share opinions on apparently real happenings that we come to know from the media or word of mouth, relive memories, quote sayings. Old talk? Well, what is new talk? Something that is different from the usual? Something that resonates with our thinking neurons?
Knowingly or unknowingly we crave for the new that takes us out, even if for a short while.