The Art of Listening

And how to fall in love with the world

Young Girls In A Rowboat by Claude Monet

For the longest time, and from a whole lot of conditioning, I was under the assumption that I was less than intelligence. I was convinced when I entered a room, I couldn’t hold a candle to anyone. Everyone seemed to know so much more than me and I was always asking questions, wondering, asking how things worked, interested in people’s jobs and talents, in wonder of all the ways the world worked. I wouldn’t come away from rooms feeling inferior, instead, I would come home feeling energised, interested in learning more about how the world worked. You see, for the longest time, I had thought that those of us who asked questions were someone not as smart as the ones who answered questions and asked none.

It was only later that I learned asking questions was how one kept intellect and wonder alive. And in a world where mystery and awe were constantly diminishing and people become more and more set in their ways, the ability to ask questions and being interested in other people’s perspectives is an essential part of growth as a human being.

A friend of mine once pointed out to me that the human equivalent of stopping to smell the flowers was to just pause and truly listen wholeheartedly to what someone was saying about their life experiences. And it made me realise quickly why we got so angry at each other over the smallest things in our lives. When you are in the habit of not listening, you have turned yourself into the kind of person so set in your ways that you consider no one else worthy of listening to.

The art of listening is simple really. You just have to close your ears to your own internal voice and not be waiting for your turn to talk. Instead, you need to focus, entirely, on what someone else is telling you. As a writer and a poet, I cannot tell you how often the act of discovery lies in listening to someone and realising how different the cadence of human experience is, how unique but still relatable every life lived is.

So how do you fall in love with the world? Grace. You give grace to people. You listen to them. You walk amongst the trees and understand they’ve been here long before you. You smell flowers without plucking them. You log off social media once in a while and understand that how algorithms are devised specially to draw your attention by outraging you. But more than anything, it is the art of listening. The art of understanding that the human race isn’t as bad as social media wants you to believe. Or the news wants you to believe.

That we have a great practice of good within us all and the way to connect with it is have faith, have hope and most of all have the love that is needed to survive any and every existential crisis.

A Small Writing Prompt

In your journal, write seven to ten things you have loved about the world. This could be a memory or just a daily thing you get to see (flowers, the garden, the sky, a loved one). Revisit this list when you are annoyed or sad. Additionally, every week, add at least one new thing to this list and revisit at the end of the year.