This is today’s writing prompt

For certain I have one quote that stands alone as a favorite. The quote for the most part is attributed to Frederich Nietzsche, but I don’t think that it has ever actually been verified who wrote it.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

On Hearing the Music:
I don’t think of it as a quote about dancing. I think about it as a quote about judgment, and how fast
we hand it out. We watch someone move or dance through the world in a way that doesn’t make sense to us, and we decide something is wrong with them. We don’t critique our vantage point, we critique them as a human.

But before I judge, I should ask myself: do I hear their music? Not “do I understand them and their dancing?” It takes work to see and understand their dance. Do I have access to the thing that’s driving their motion? Most of the time the answer is no. I’m standing outside of a room with the volume off,
watching someone dance and move, deciding from my own deaf ears what that dance means.

And even if I could hear it — would I listen? Or would I keep the sound on just long enough to confirm what I’d already decided, then mute it again?
And if I let it play all the way through — would I like it? Would I stay long enough to hear what it’s actually saying? Or, would I bail the moment it stopped sounding like my own music?

That’s the part most people skip. They’ll grant you a few bars. They won’t sit through the whole song.
From a communication standpoint, this is supposed to be the one thing humans do that nothing else does — take another person’s position or point of view and actually stand in it or see the circumstance from their perspesctive, not just view as if looking down a rifle scope:

Sender and receiver. Encode and decode. That’s the model. But the model assumes good-faith reception. It assumes the receiver wants the signal, not just enough of it to justify the conclusion they arrived at first.

I don’t think we hear the music. I think we see the dancing, we’re uncomfortable that we don’t understand it, The discomfort in a stranger’s rhythm is easier to resolve by naming them the crazy.