SIDDHARTHA is a story by the German author Hermann Hesse. It is all about the spiritual journey of self-discovery by a young man, Siddhartha. In one of the conversations, Siddhartha was asked what his talents were. He replied with I can listen, I can fast and I can wait. Let us deal with the first, first.
I can listen. Whenever I conduct seminars on Listening, I always use two quotes. The first is obvious and the second indistinct. The first quote is "God gave us two ears and one mouth so we may able to listen twice as much as we talk." Obvious right? We can even see it. We should listen more and talk less but we all know that is not the case. In reality, it is more like four mouths and a single ear. Most people would rather talk than listen. Look around, better still listen around. So much noise, people talking, tweeting, posting like they were all experts. One time, I did an experiment. I posted something on social media just to find out if people would react. I did not have long to wait. In a matter of minutes, people from all over, people I had never heard of were saying and posting their opinions and the disturbing thing was most of them were crude and vile. So much anger. But they could not control themselves and what was supposedly an honest opinion quickly became ranting, raving, and online salivating. An hour later, the thread grew into a virtual rage machine. I just had to laugh. Not listening nowadays apparently is no longer limited to conversations. It has mutated to online clashes. But still, the principle remains.
The other quote comes from one of my favorite Paul Williams albums, his first actually. (If you do not know who Paul Williams is well, go and find out). That album has wonderful songs but tucked away in that album is a quote. "There are those who listen and there are those who wait to talk." Obviously, that was meant for the listener to just sit and listen to the songs. But that can be daunting because as we all know, listening can be difficult. Unlike what others think, listening is not passive. It is an active skill that must be practiced again and again. In order for us to listen, we must not have preconceived ideas or biases because if we did, we will stop listening altogether. If we want to listen, we need to have an open mind and an attitude of interest as to what the other person is expressing. Otherwise, we would all end up like that rage machine I mentioned above. We need to practice the skill of wanting to listen and not waiting to talk.
And yes, we listen to people who we value and love. Otherwise, we just are like trolls paid to deliberately induce income via comments.
We only listen to people we truly love. Think about that.