This was a knowledge I accidentally stumbled into as a teenager. As an undergraduate student, I had an acquaintance who had a thing for wanting to chat but only in the evenings because that is the time we were both free. If you look at him physically, bro was fine. We were not going to date but he had that ‘fine’ you would be comfortable to show off to people.
However, I realised that every time we spoke, I would return to my room sad. I was not a sad, grumbling teenager so this was not my internal location talking. It happened three times in a row. The third time it happened, I was with my girls and we were bright, playful, and loud, so I had enough evidence that third time. I left them to go see him and when I returned, I was grey, tired and frustrated with a life I did not have. I was not even sad about his life which would have meant I was empathetic; life in general just looked grey. Then I told my friends what I noticed.
Every conversation you have and consume is a door to a specific location in time. Certain conversations would invite you to taste trauma, some would invite you to heal, some will bring you to a place of low self-esteem, and some will bring you to a place of courage. Some will transport you to your childhood and some will sell you a picture of the future. Some will bring you to marriage and some will take you out of it. When you are asked to guard what you see and hear, it is not to make you consume lesser content but to ensure that what you consume does not lead you to places riddled with the problems you are trying to change or worse, problems you never had a business with.
Every conversation you have had has attempted to open a door for you to walk through. If you found the location repulsive the first few times, after a while you begin to say, “It is their life, not mine”, meaning you have started leaving the doors open.
While you may not walk in, the smell will get to you, and you will smell like it. One day, the overflow of that place will roll into your world. The same applies to good places you cannot imagine yet. If you have conversations around it long enough and leave the door open, you will smell like it and it will begin to roll into your world, giving you the courage to walk into that new beautiful place that was once only an imagination.