Sparks from the Fire

Check out It’s All About The Mouth – Part 1 in case you missed it.

I’m not what one might call a big talker.  As I get older, I talk less and less.  It’s not that I have nothing to say; it’s just that I think I get a lot more out of life by being a better listener.

So at social gatherings of friends and families I’m usually the guy who has the least to say.  You wouldn’t know it by my blog posts.  I know, I’m a bit long winded in my stories and I’m constantly advised to make things shorter.  I’ll give it a shot, but I don’t really know if that’s me as a writer.

They say that nobody has time to read anymore, so keep it short.  And yet look at the success of the Kindle.  Somebody out there is still doing a lot of reading.

Perhaps it’s you to whom I’m talking.

In creative meetings I learned long ago to be the guy who has little to say at the beginning of the meeting when listening to everybody else is important.  Then when it’s time to summarize or in fact come up with the concept, I’m usually the guy who can synthesize all the ideas together into a concept that everybody agrees with because I’ve been the guy who’s been listening.  The process works.

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I woke up this morning with a new family. Babies crying, five year olds running up and down the aisles, moms breast feeding, people sprawled all over the “house” in general disarray – some still sleeping, some just waking up, some already into their morning prayers, some stretching what they could where they could.

I’m on a flight from NYC to Sao Paulo, Brazil and when I went to sleep five hours ago, I was in a flying movie theater; now I wake up to this bustling family of man waking up to another day at 32,000 feet.  The sun pours through the few opened windows as we ride atop a rich layer of frothy white clouds.  There must be an ocean down there somewhere, but if it is, it’s hiding for the moment.

Last night I went to sleep among strangers; this morning we are surprisingly family. Well, after all, we did sleep together. We rode across the sky together.  Few things changed, but now we’re talking to one another – some in English, some in Portuguese – we’re playing with each other’s babies, whereas last night their crying was just a nuisance to us all.

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