The (Lost) Art Of Listening

How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry? Bob Dylan
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen. Ernest Hemingway
Bore – a person who talks when you wish him to listen. Ambrose Bierce


OUR ears will never get us in trouble, even if we keep them open all the time. Our mouth may speak hurtful words and our consciousness may lead us to do unkind deeds, causing someone else’s pain. But our ears – they are perhaps the most taken-for-granted part of our body. The ones we use perfunctorily, if our lives depended on them.


Have you noticed how the world seems to be speaking to us in syllables and monotones most of our waking time? It’s like everything is a blur of fast-moving trains, and empty conversations, harried faces and hurried footsteps, frazzled nerves and stressed out egos, muffled tones and squeaky bones. It’s like we are forever running around in circles, going everywhere but really just to nowhere.


And it’s all because we don’t stop to listen anymore. We don’t listen to ourselves, much less to others. We don’t pay attention to our thoughts, to the beating of our heart and the cravings of our soul. We go through the daily grind deaf to the voice of reason, dumb to the ways of humanity, unmindful of the sounds emanating from within, unable to hear the searing music that fills the vapid air.


Have we become totally insensitive to life outside our own? Have we turned on the mute button at will, 24/7? Have we, knowingly or not, shut us off from the hum of the bees and the call of the wild?


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Listen to the other person. It isn’t always about us. The universe doesn’t revolve around us. Sometimes, people aren’t interested in what comes out of our lips; but we don’t notice because we are rapt in our own world, lost in our own egocentric grumbling.


Have we ever stopped and looked at the other person deep in their eyes? Stopped and listened to them speak, took in the sound of their voice, gazed at their facial movements, watched their body talk? Have we ever really thought about what lies behind the façade? Hammered into our own awareness the reality that they, too, have a story to tell?


Let’s pause for a while, and contemplate. What they’re saying may not be the wisdom of the ages, but neither is ours. Let’s give them the courtesy of our undivided attention. Make them feel that they exist, for once. Say only what needs to be said, nod in appreciation, squeeze their hand now and then, sit back, settle down and yield to their own muttering.


Then we’ll realize that existing takes more than just looking after ourselves, thinking about ourselves, making something out of ourselves. There are other people in our field of dreams as well, who are no less important in the general scheme of things. Let us not forget that even as we believe we are superior to some, we are vastly inferior to many; and in the final reckoning, before the eyes of our Creator, no one is greater than the other.


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Listen to yourself. Do you hear what you’re saying? When you say yes, don’t you in fact mean maybe, I’ll see, I’ll think about it, I’m not sure, I don’t know? Do you absent-mindedly nod when you should actually shake your head? Do you open your mouth first, think later and then regret it?


How many times have we put ourselves in awkward or embarrassing situations mainly because we didn’t give much thought to what we were supposed to say? How many enemies have we made simply because we did things that were better left undone? If our orifice didn’t work faster than our brain, we would be spared the ignominy of shooting ourselves often where it hurts.


Listen to your body. Do you hear it creaking here and there? Does it mumble aches in some joints and pound like crazy in some inner nooks and crannies? More often than not, we neglect them like nothing. Our tired limbs grunt and our weary mind groans, but we just move on to the pressing need of the hour. We perish the thought for another day, until the grunts and groans become too audible to ignore and our body becomes too feeble to resist.


Listen to your heart, it knows everything. It speaks volumes when the flesh has been rendered numb to the wiles of the world. When it’s calling for you, do you take heed or do you look the other way? Do you trip the light fantastic or do you seek refuge in the cover of twilight? Do you take the plunge or do you hedge your bets? Did you choose wisely or are you forever in regret?


Let us listen to the music of our lives, the songs that we sang when we were growing up, when we fell in love, when we were happy, when we were lonely, when we were troubled, when we were carefree. Without music, what are we? What would life be but a voiceless, dreamless void – a labyrinth of noise and clatter, a web of tangled emotions and jumbled situations, a maze of boring rhyme and joyless rhythm?


Let us listen to the sounds that remind us of how human we are, the sounds that kept us from going over the edge at one time or another, that made us sit up either in amazement or bewilderment, that made us weep in sweet surrender or get away from the dissonance of twisted lives and busted morals. A new-born baby crying, a child laughing, grass rustling under our feet, birds chirping on tree-tops, leaves crackling with the wind, water falling from rocks up ahead, someone whispering saccharine nothings to our ear – aren’t they the sounds that make us alive?


Let us listen when all around us it is silent, and what we will hear is our soul murmuring.