You think we want presents? No my friend. We want your Presence.
I was once on a date with someone who gave me 100% of his attention while I was talking. It was so shocking that I stopped mid sentence, lost my train of thought, became flustered and started giggling like a nervous girl.
He looked at me and asked if I were alright, I replied: are you alright? He said yes, why would you ask? I replied, because you aren’t saying anything. He said to me: It’s because I was listening.
I was blown away.
In that moment, he had me. Hook, line, and sinker. If he had asked me to run away with him, I’d probably have thrown caution to the wind and started packing.
The gift of someone’s full attention and absolute presence is a lost art these days and let me tell you, that lost skill is intoxicating.
As women, we’ve grown used to men half listening, looking over our shoulders on dates to see who walks in the room, and watched them bring their cell phones to rest on the dinner table as though someone more exciting might call during our time together.
And both sexes are guilty of this.
We’ve grown so used to multi tasking that even when we’re face to face, we’re not truly present. We don’t listen, we lay in wait to speak next, and when we share stories, rarely does anyone ask a question to dive deeper. Instead, someone runs with the conversation baton bringing it back to the almighty subject of them and their seemingly similar experience.
We uh huh one another and multi task our time away from dawn to dusk.
We’re not even present with our beloved pets. How many times has your dog stood there with a toy, tail wagging, gazing patiently at your face while you text, type or turn the channel?
We hand our children video games and call that parenting.
We send abbreviated text and call that communicating.
Hell, we’re too lazy to even pick up the phone and speak voice to voice during a fight. We text.
They say that no one ever laid on their deathbed and wished for another day of work or another dollar. My bet is, we’ll wish for another hour of looking into our loved ones eyes, or the ability to walk that sweet fur face one last time. We won’t be wishing we sent another email or watched another Netflix show. We’ll wish we had the opportunity to spend time with the people we love, in their presence.
Image Courtesy Skyler King on Unsplash