Forget interesting, be interested
I was reading a newsletter the other day and said to my wife, ‘I love this guy, he’s just so interested.’ ‘Do you mean interesting?’, she asked. But no, I meant interested.
Perhaps we like the idea of being an interesting person, or we worry that we are not interesting enough? But the real question is how interested are we?
I went to see Stefan Sundström the other night. He’s a Swedish folk/rock/punk guy, who’s now in his 70s and has a sideline in books on garden compost. We put in our earplugs and got right up the front.
Why don’t I do this more often, I thought, go to a rock concert with a crowd of pensioners?
There are so many things that I don’t do. What would it be like to have a default of being interested until proven otherwise, rather than assuming I’m not interested until convinced that I might be?
