On the subject of nice frames

A few days ago I made a new acquaintance — interesting personality, joyful character; the kind of person you’re grateful to have met. The following days I was really keen on further communication — text based due to distance, which, on a side note, actually isn’t a bad thing at all. Talking seems to be the right thing to do in order to share experiences, writing appears to be predestined for getting to know someone’s wolrd of thought. Anyway: communication at first went fine, but after a while I had the feeling my conversational partner lost interest. The atmosphere kind of infected me and I got all gloomy and listless. This really annoyed me and I tried to find a way out of my bad mood. I thought about what the situation was, what I wanted it to be or how I could view it from a different perspective so that it looked all good again. And then it struck me: “Hey … you’re talking to an interesting person. Most people, when you give them some kind of input, come out with some average ouput you won’t really consider to be interesting. Here you got someone that, given input, grants you valuable, interesting ouput in exchange. Why don’t you simply ask whether or not there’s still interest in further communication, whether or not you’re annoying/uninteresting? If there’s still interest and you’re not annoying: go ahead and enjoy this rare personality you consider yourself fortunate having become acquainted with.”
All of a sudden my mood turned from pretty down to fully enthusiastic again. : )
All I did was to take the present situation and put it in a nice frame so that it looked pleasant and motivating again. What I did in the first place was assuming that there was something wrong with the situation. What I did to fix it was to realize that I only know my own situation, which actually is fortunate, and that I should ask whether or not the situation of my communicational partner is as it seems to me. As it turned out later my first assumption was completely wrong and I was “allowed” to continue being curious and carry on the conversation. :3
I also realized that I had done this (putting something in a nice frame) before, however I hadn’t observed myself and concentrated on what I was doing back then. Anyway: it seems to be a nice technique to handle unpleasant situations: take what you got, consider that you might have made a mistake in the way you currently view the situation, try to fix those mistakes and thus put things in a nice frame. : )

2012-02-21