Listening

"The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous.  One is fluid, the other is rigid.  One is alive, the other is stuffed.  Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening.  Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.  When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues.  Like so much of what I learned in the theater, this turned out to be how life works, too."

- from Alan Alda's new memoir, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I’ve Learned