listening

I was thinking today about two different ways to listen in a conversation. One way is to listen to someone, which means they say what they want to say, and we encourage them to keep talking about it until they’ve said everything they want to say, and we’ve learned something about them. The other kind of listening is listening for something, when we let the person talk for a little while, but the whole time we’re keeping an ear out for a link to something we know about so we can talk back at them, and we don’t really get to know them at all. I guess that’s called having an agenda. Some religious people can be like this a lot.