on’t Step on My Lines

ometime ago Baron Von Lodge was the head of a small country near Switzerland known as Lilliland.

The Lilliland Playhouse was a popular part of Lilliland culture. The playhouse even offered acting lessons to students who appreciated the art of acting. Sometimes what a person learned in acting class was very useful in everyday life.

Everyone knew that William Shakespeare considered the world as a stage and everyone was an actor, in his own way.

One of the first things that an actor learned was to respect his fellow actor. He was to be prepared with all his lines memorized and with a positive attitude toward what the playwright was trying to present.

As actors said their lines, they quickly learned not to accidentally say each other’s lines or speak a line at the same time another actor was speaking. A heated dialogue scene was more difficult for the actors because the lines needed to be spoken clearly but in rapid fire. If the audience heard two sentences spoken at the same time, then the purpose of the plot and the scene were lost.

In real life, when two people were arguing, it was important that one allowed the other to present his point of view and not try to drown him out with his own rhetoric.

Some ignorant people believed that if the argument turned into a fight and one person knocked the other down, the person left standing was the winner of the argument. This was as far away from the truth as anyone could get. Pushing and shoving in an argument only escalated the conflict. The real winner was the person closer to the truth. Eventually, when the truth became known, the value of the argument seemed superfluous.

If one person constantly stepped on the other person’s lines, then they ran the risk of not truly knowing what point of view was being presented by the other side. Perhaps, in the long run, the two sides were not really that far apart.

“Shouting the other person down is often like stepping on the other person’s lines. Let the other person speak, then you speak, both very clearly. That’s the best way,” Professor Hamblin added.