Foraging for Gold - Part 1

Everyone’s waiting to be ‘discovered,’ so our task is to discover the gold in people, and more particularly the gold they have to give.

Worth is an entrancing concept, it really is. None of us can begin to escape the power of its hold on us within the context of our individual and collective worlds.

We all desire to be found worthy.

The Alluring Phenomenon of ‘Interest’

Whenever we engage any significant time in conversation, we will—in our very active listening—normally always arrive at the point-of-passion; that thing the person opposite us seeks to be known for. And their momentary hopes sit contingent, and are hence realised, in our quietly assertive affirmation of them, right in that context they’re self-identified with.

That Point-of-Passion

This is likely to be that very point that people ‘fix’ on, as they talk about the broader context, then suddenly transfix to a single item—the point-of-passion—finding it difficult, suddenly, to budge from. For a moment at least they track off into their inner world to retrieve for us just an apex-aspect of this wonderful world of theirs.

This, of course, occurs to the lagging detriment of the broader detail they more appropriately should have remained on; the conversation flow interrupted, or at least diverged from.

Nonetheless, it’s an important juncture to allow them to run on—at least for the moment. We have an aspect of the other person, here, that is more ‘them’ than we could readily get otherwise, and we’d be loath to dissuade them by crudely cutting them off.

Moulding Points-of-Passion into Gold

Not for us, and mainly for them, we still have a role at times in dropping a seed to germinate, as well as possibly, watering or fertilising it.

Gold like we’re discussing—even though it is inorganic much like the real thing—is grown. The discoverable aspects of a person’s soul are given shape and form in the very action of our affirmation, and in truth—because we do not flatter—we facilitate a platform that might otherwise not have existed.

The Overall Perspective

There is really very little like the feeling we receive when we’ve buoyed people in truth. There’s a lucid power about it. Perspectives are aligned in the practice of such community and it can really only end positively.

The key to knowing people and siding with them is finding out what in them lies undiscovered—even to them as an ‘undiscovered’ whole via their talents, knowledge and abilities—and simply affirming them in it. If not, at least we accept this within ourselves. And, of course, we learn from them in those areas we’re deficient.

How people define themselves—the positive aspects of identity—is how we should also seek to define them.

This ensures we hold them as worthily as we can, for worthiness-of-esteem is the greatest and simplest gift we can, of ourselves, bestow on another human being.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.