Whenever it is time for dinner I usually have a couple of glasses of whatever beverage besides water to drink with my meal. I drink water throughout the day and want to taste something different for a change. When I was sitting down one day at my old apartment eating my dinner and drinking my orange juice, there was this annoying loud voice that said, “Man, you are not even tasting what you are drinking, you chug it down and get another glass.” My former roommate began to laugh and said afterwards he was just playin. Bullshit! That fool was trying to prove a point and I didn’t care what he said. I kept on drinking more glasses in retaleation of his ‘wanna-be-moral-of-the-story’ comment.
I continued to watch some tv and went to bed angry. I don’t know why I let the statement get to me, I thought about it for a couple of days and then coudn’t take it any more and asked him what he meant by it. I had an idea what he was talking about, but I wanted to hear it from his ‘doctor-Phil’ ass reasoning. He said I didn’t appreciate or taste what I was drinking. I didn’t care so much for what the beverage tasted like. I started to think of other incidents where I did something similar. As I thought I kept on saying to myself, “damn, yep, that’s right, hmm, oh well…”.
This realization happened about 5 months ago and am still thinking about it right now. I think the reason is because I learned so much from what I was doing from another person’s eyes. Sometimes we cannot see what we are either doing wrong or just doing when we are always looking at ourselves. We need outside help from time to time to tell us how it really is. We have to be willing to take critisim and see what it is really all about. I am still learning this trait and will continue until the day I stop existing.
Today I don’t talk to that roommate much. Only when we see each other around town. He is friend’s with a lot of people I associate with. But it is now more of a ‘hi and bye’ relationship. He is one of the reasons I moved out of my apartment in the first place, but that is besides the point. We can learn anything about ourselves through others, as long as we are willing to listen.