Who's listening?

People hardly ever listen. We don't hear what we don't want to hear - which are ironically the things we need to hear. I guess that's why advice is so easily given and not taken, or maybe why nagging irritates people so much.

"We have 2 ears and 1 mouth that we may listen twice as much as we talk," I think that was how the saying went. What a tired line that must be. We usually turn a deaf ear to the unpleasant sounds of life anyway - relationship problems, work deadlines and sometimes even our own physical pain (if I can tolerate it, I'd rather not go to the dentist).

Along the process though, we betray ourselves the most. Sometimes we can be so tactless and yet we resent people who are; we comfort and try to appease the people we care about when they are sad while we ourselves are so difficult to talk to when we are not in the mood; we share our musings and yet we forget them when we are discouraged; we get angry and end up saying things we don't even mean. Then when everything comes apart at the seams, we wonder what happened.

Maybe because people hardly ever listen. And the person we listen to the least would be... ourselves.