If you read last Friday’s Exhale, some of the following reflection will sound familiar. The quotation about quiet and hearing more struck a chord with me. Too many of us, including me, spend too much time with our phones or TV. As I remind my mother, there are definitely positives to modern technology, such as being able to communicate with distant loved ones or watching programmes that truly inform and uplift us. However, so much of it is mental clutter, unnecessary and detrimental to our wellbeing. We are surrounded by external noise, which worsens our internal noise, leading to stress, anxiety and our increasing inability to truly hear ourselves and those around us.

Some of the best, most satisfying conversations I have are with my children. At the supper table, our topics range from Henry VIII‘s personality and his motivation for his many wives as well as the perennial fascination with the Tudors, to current world politics and societal shifts and upheaval to philosophical questions and the next steps in our journeys. They reassure me, feeding my optimism that we are connecting, sharing not just our knowledge but also taking the time to listen to one another. 

The conversations make me smile, but because profoundly connecting with my children is fundamentally important to me, I am at the same time most aware that I am a poor listener. While they are speaking, I am listening, but at the same time I default to thinking about me: my to-do list, my thought snippets, rewinding my day, among those many thousands that flit through our minds every day. It is something I have been trying – small steps – to work on lately. Specifically, I am reminded of this when I talk to one of my sons, who stutters severely. I listen and try to understand what he is explaining about programming and specific steps in game creation. I try to think of reasonably intelligent questions, which means I don’t always absorb everything as I am more focussed on not forgetting my questions!

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.  Ram Dass 

The other day, we had a fascinating talk about this quotation and how it can be interpreted. One way is that the more quiet I am, meaning the less I allow outside noise, like social media and people who negatively complicate my life for no good reason, to take up space in my orbit and my mind, the more I will hear what is important. I will hear what is necessary, what is true to who I am, having time and internal space to connect the dots of my life in order to live my journey in a calmer, more sustainable way.

Also, listening is not the same as hearing. Yes, sometimes, especially as we get older, we are listening but what we hear is unclear; the syllables, the sounds do not coalesce into a coherent whole that our brains can comprehend and process. How many times and how many ways can I ask someone to say it again . . . Too often however, we hear the words, but part of the problem is that we are focussing too much on ourselves, our egos. When this happens, we are not truly hearing. Not only are we not hearing the words, we are also not hearing the emotion, all that is unsaid, the expression in a person’s eyes, that if we make an effort will be heard by our minds and hearts with openness, gentleness and sensitivity.

The most important conversations are the personal ones. Hearing the words and trying to focus, to listen for what is unspoken, trusting my knowledge, my intuition more as I get older to fill me in on the doubts, the insecurities, the context. 

Any thoughts about this? Let me know in the comments.

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