Same Wavelength With Someone Quotes

Surely, I thought, there is something magical about someone who was on the same wavelength as you were, feeling the way you felt when you felt it. Anticipating correctly was the best love song any girl could want. It meant you cared enough to think hard about someone else beside yourself. And I’m sorry, but you could count on your fingers how many like that you knew your whole life.

the boundaries between different categories are often arbitrary, but once some arbitrary boundary exists, we forget that it is arbitrary and get way too impressed with its importance. For example, the visual spectrum is a continuum of wavelengths from violet to red, and it is arbitrary where boundaries are put for different color names (for example, where we see a transition from “blue” to “green”); as proof of this, different languages arbitrarily split up the visual spectrum at different points in coming up with the words for different colors. Show someone two roughly similar colors. If the color-name boundary in that person’s language happens to fall between the two colors, the person will overestimate the difference between the two. If the colors fall in the same category, the opposite happens. In other words, when you think categorically, you have trouble seeing how similar or different two things are. If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to complete pictures.

But among those 150 people, Dunbar stressed that there are hierarchical "layers of friendship" determined by how much time you spend with the person. It's kind of like a wedding cake where the topmost layer consist of only one or two people—say, a spouse and best friend—with whom you are most intimate and interact daily. The next layer can accommodate at most four people for whom you have great affinity, affection, and concern. Friendships at this level require weekly attention to maintain. Out from there, the tiers contain more casual friends who you see less often and thus, your ties are more tenuous. Without consistent contact, they easily fall into the realm of acquaintance. At this point, you are friendly but not really friends, because you've lost touch with who they are, which is always evolving. You could easily have a beer with them, but you wouldn't miss them terribly, or even notice right way, if they moved out of town. Nor would they miss you. An exception might be friends with whom you feel like you can pick up right where you left or even though you haven't talked to them for ages. According to Dunbar, these are usually friendships forged through extensive and deep listening at some point in your life, usually during an emotionally wrought time, like during college or early adulthood, or maybe during a personal crisis like an illness or divorce. It's almost as if you have banked a lot of listening that you can draw on later to help you understand and relate to that person even after significant time apart. Put another way, having listened well and often to someone in the past makes it easier to get back on the same wavelength when you get out of sync, perhaps due to physical separation or following a time of emotional distance caused by an argument.

So when we communicate with someone else effectively, we do something that has been described colloquially for a few generations: we get on the same wavelength. Literally. Our brain patterns match each other.

To wanting the man who goes to the diner on Sunday mornings because he knows his mom is struggling with being alone.  The man who took on the peewee team because he knew those boys needed a role model.  The man who will always take on an extra shift to cover for someone else because he thinks their families are more important than him living the bachelor life. The man who once again proves we’re always on the same wavelength.

...hearing is at the heart of obedience. The '-edi-' in 'obedience' is from audire, from which we also get 'audio': obedience is about hearing with someone else (in hippie jargon, being tuned in to the same wavelength)....True obedience is not so much a bending of the will as it is a work of the intellect leading the will.

It's rather the possibility of friendship, unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness; the possibility of working on the same wavelength, as it were, with someone who understands you because he's a boy as you are, or a girl as you are. Committee work stifles the imagination, because people have to work down to the common denominator of what would be minimally acceptable to everyone. But friendship exalts the imagination. Indeed it is one of the things that the ancients said friendship was for. Plato suggests in Symposium that one of the highest forms of friendship is one whose love issues forth in beautiful and virtuous deeds, for thus "the partnership between [the friends] will be far closer and the bond of affection far stronger than between ordinary parents, because the children that they share surpass human children by being immortal as well as more beautiful.

Today I've been reflecting on the benefits bestowed by the social anonymity of a traveller 'in the wilds'. To the peasants and tribesmen here one is merely a human being—outwardly strange but fundamentally one of them—and their spontaneous acceptance and hospitality is extended with an air of full and unselfconscious equality. In contrast, how deep is the gulf between groups of human beings in our society—go into a pub in Connemara or a café in rural Italy or even a posada in the remotest part of relatively unspoiled Spain and you find it impossible to establish the same easy rapport. You are at once noted as a non-peasant and are therefore someone to be envied, or admired, or despised, or kept aloof from, as individual temperaments dictate. Probably you will be treated most kindly by the peasants there, but at the deepest level you are automatically isolated because you have (they imagine) more money or more education or 'better' manners than they have. So I appreciate the chance to share the people's lives here for a time without regarding myself, or being regarded by them, as an intruder. Yet I also appreciate coming back to converse among friends who are on my own wave-length.