The Lush Life Chronicles - - Volume 8: The Sounding Board

Way back in March I introduced you to a Pillar of The American Dream that I called The Clark. I told you that it was not to be confused with your best friend. I'll tell you the same thing applies here in regards to the person that you call The Sounding Board. However, if The Clark and The Sounding Board are the same person, it might be fair to assume that they are your best friend. Because when a person helps you fulfill two Pillars of The Lush Life...well, that's what best friends are all about. The Sounding Board provides a service that everybody needs and thus people will pay obscene amounts of money in order to obtain it. The services that The Sounding Board provides form the basis for a billion dollar industry. But I don't know if I can stress fervently enough that The Sounding Board cannot be purchased. Attempting to purchase such an item will devalue it of all that makes it a worthy Pillar of the Lush Life. No, The Lush Life mandates that the person who acts as your The Sounding Board does so because they care about you.

Whenever somebody experiences something that is comedic yet traumatic at the same time they are often able to joke about how much their future therapy will cost. Therapy is ridiculously expensive, but it's also a human necessity. Therapy is not a frivolous luxury. The need for humans to talk about their problems is real and necessary. If your rich you can afford to pay a professional with "expertise" to do it. If you're poor you can hope to find people generous enough to help you deal with your issues for free, or you can bottle them up until you pop off a few shots from an upper floor of the book depository. Your mental health depends upon your ability to release your frustrations and anger in a cathartic manner. Other Pillars of The Lush Life including The Bubble, The Hobby, and The Kelli can all help with this, but nothing has been as proven a tried and true method for solving your problems as talking about them with somebody who wants to help you.

I don't have any problem with therapy whatsoever. It helps a lot of people and a lot of people really need it. However, it's not The Sounding Board. The Sounding Board is free by it's very nature. Therapy requires you to schedule an appointment. The Sounding Board should be there for you whenever you need it. You have a professional therapist-patient relationship with your therapist that likely does not get crossed outside of sessions. The Sounding Board requires an extensive level of trust in comfort in companionship that is built out in the real world. And most importantly a therapist wants you to be happy out of the vested interest that you are a client and that your well-being reflects upon them. The Sounding Board wants you to be happy because they care about you on a deeper level and in a way your happiness is there happiness. At it's simplest level The Sounding Board is just somebody that you can talk to and share anything with. They should be a good listener but also capable of giving you honest and constructive feedback. At it's most complex level The Sounding Board is a mentor who challenges you to be the most creative, healthy, productive person you can be.

The Sounding Board doesn't have to be your best friend or a close family member, but it should be somebody who you have confidence in and who you feel comfortable talking to. Oftentimes, this results from a sense of shared personal experiences. Your AA sponsor is somebody that you can share your personal fears and shortcomings with because they have likely had similar issues and can understand things that your friends or family would not. Listening is probably the most important part of the job for The Sounding Board. However, it shouldn't be passive listening. A good The Sounding Board will make the speaker feel like you are engaged, but more importantly that they are not being judged. They have chosen to share something with you because they feel like you are a safe haven. Don't misplace that trust by placing judgment upon that persons choices, feelings, or beliefs. However, this is a two-way street. Don't tell The Sounding Board things that they should reasonably have to pass judgment on.  If you find that you have an insatiable desire to strangle young, blonde prostitutes...don't tell The Sounding Board. Tell your therapist, which you should probably have.

However, The Sounding Board is more than somebody who listens to your problems. They should also want to listen to your successes. The Sounding Board is just a good, comfortable conversationalist. The conversations don't have to be heavy or about problems. They're just somebody that you can talk to about anything. You can tell them about the hot new guy/girl you like, your frustrations with your new job, or request their advice on buying a new car or home. And advice is also a very important dimension of your relationship with The Sounding Board. Sometimes, what you're telling them is just about you needing to vent and all you need for them is to nod and respond with things like "Right on" and "That's understandable". However, sometimes you're confused about a situation or occurrence and you need the recommendation of a person who is sound of mine on what course of action you should take. This is why The Sounding Board should be more than a good listener. They should also be somebody with good sense who can competently impart advice. You don't want a "Yes Man" as your The Sounding Board. It's important that The Sounding Board is willing to offend your delicate sensibilities in order to make sure that you don't do something stupid or reckless.

Sometimes The Sounding Board doesn't even need to speak their piece in order to give you advice. I have a lot of ideas and usually talking them over with people will allow me to gauge their value using only that person's body language. Oftentimes I realize that I have a great idea on my hand's and significantly less often I might realize that my idea is incredibly stupid. However, somebody to talk to who's a good listener and can offer you meaningful feedback is significantly harder to find in today's America. Our attention spans are dropping to near record lows with all of the technological advances that have put whatever we want within our reach whenever we want it. We have also become a more self-concerned society. We are less interested in listening to other people when we could be talking about ourselves. But the biggest obstacle might be that social networking has made it so that friendships are easier to come by and thus require less effort. I'm sure that most of you reading this have a lot of friends. But how much effort do you put into those friendships? And how many friendships do you have where they would work awkwardly if you were the only two people in the room? Too many acquaintanceships require other people or mutual friends to sweeten the pot in order to make conversation flow.

I've stated many times that these Pillars of the Lush Life are something to be "achieved" or "attained". However, achieving a Pillar of the Lush Life isn't like getting 3 stars on a level of Angry Birds. You don't just attain it and then move on. Lush Life Pillars are something that have to be worked on consistently and indefinitely throughout your life to be maintained. There should never be a sense of complacency that you ever have too much success within a certain realm of The Lush Life. However, Pillars are also judged on a spectrum. I might think that I have a Pillar pretty well handled, however, I might not have nearly as firm of a grip on it as a friend of mine. Everybody has some semblance of each of these Pillars, but few people have mastered all 12 of them. I like to think that I have The Sounding Board in my life and to some extent I do. I have friends who are willing to listen to me and who will respond frankly to my problems, ideas, and stories with incites of their own. However, I don't have a single person in my life who I can talk to about anything. There are always things that I will keep to myself in the deep, dark recesses of my heart. And part of this means that I may have not found the right person who I can share anything with. The other part of this means that maybe I have, but I'm just not ready to.

This is because The Sounding Board is also about you and your willingness to open up. You can have the most enthusiastically helpful circle of friends and family ever, but if you are not willing to open up and share what needs to be shared to put yourself at ease then The Sounding Board will never work at full capacity. This might be my biggest issue with attaining The Sounding Board. I have trust issues. My thoughts on keeping secrets is: two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. I don't know that I am capable, at this stage of my life, of telling a person something that I'm not comfortable with the whole world knowing. And that's no way to live The Lush Life. Luckily for me, I have very few things that I'm not comfortable with the whole world knowing. And this philosophy helps me in a couple of ways. Firstly, I almost never say mean things about people that I wouldn't say to their face and never things that I wouldn't be okay with them finding out that I said. And I think that this makes my world a much kinder place. Secondly, I say a lot of wildly inappropriate things which are less than half of the wildly inappropriate things that I think. Thirdly, I think that I converse better with people who are more excited to talk to me because I don't have a history of saddling them with my problems and personal feelings.

However, having to hold things inside isn't especially healthy. It's socially necessary, but everybody should have that The Sounding Board who they can share anything with. This is the person with whom you don't have to feel any shame for what you think or say. And that person is a very rare person indeed. It's a built in defense function within our society for people to judge you based upon what you say. It makes most people watch what they say so that we're not just spouting ignorant shit all day. Some people (e.g. Charlie Sheen, Sarah Palin, Michael Moore) ignore this function, but that doesn't mean that the function doesn't exist. People are still judging. To have somebody who won't pass judgment on you or think less of you for what you say is a beautiful thing. It means that even when they don't agree with you and your ignorant half-assed logic, they still care enough for the greater aspects of your person that they don't let it taint their opinion of you. Treasure that...for it's a very important step on the road to The Lush Life.