Thursday, December 27, 2012

THE LOST ART OF HEARING – BABEL REVISITED



“Listen to me.”

These words have echoed down timeless hallways of schools and colleges, and are embedded in the minds of countless students. Everyone can remember being encouraged to listen both in classrooms, and at home.

This childhood instruction has  sorrowfully lost its way into adulthood. Adults somehow conveniently forget the art of listening, having discarded it  along with chalkboard, duster or building block toys as an accouterments of childhood.

How often we listen, but don’t hear. Studies conflictingly report that we remember 20 to fifty percent of what we hear. The rest is lost. The ability to listen would involve honing our hearing skills with the following steps:

1.     Paying voluntary attention: Putting aside other things, looking at the speaker, setting aside other things, giving physical feedback with verbal and non verbal signs such as nodding and saying yes.
2.     Actively remembering to file the information received in your mind
3.     Clarifying points that are not understood
4.     Thinking or meditating on what was said.
5.     Replying relevantly

In our nanobyte world, our attention span lasts only 22 seconds before it flits onto some other bit or byte of information now programmed to assault our senses. This  is not conducive to consistent listening.  It encourages a flight of ideas and does not let our mind concentrate constructively on thoughts or patterns, but rather seeks to change them like constantly changing tv screens.

Jesus seemed to know all about this, and in his course of instruction, found the need to reiterate by saying “Truly, truly I say unto you”, almost underlining the necessity for us to listen to what he was saying. Johns gospel records twenty three times he repeated this phrase. He also bemoaned the historical fact that humans, as a race,  tended to listen, but not hear[1].  The solution is in the mind of the hearer, not the speaker, and it is we who need to cultivate the lost art of hearing.

Those who are deaf need hearing aids to augment the sound arriving at the eardrum. Today we are also in need  of techniques to enhance the information arriving at our brains by allowing our senses to intelligently collect the information and allow ourselves to hear what is being spoken.

One habit that we need to actively unlearn is the habit of impatience. We are constantly encouraged to be impatient, as time speeds up our lives. We need quick solutions, fast foods, faster vehicles, and even faster technology as time warps our lives into impatient segments. We tend not involve ourselves in things that call upon us to wait. Hence, when we listen to people, our minds actively want them to finish up what they are saying quickly, and if they take too long, our mind substitutes assumptions which we seem to hear, but are not facts that the speaker is articulating at all. Hence we misinterpret people.  Those speaking to us  are at a loss because we seem to have completely misunderstood and misinterpreted what they were saying.  Those hearing too are mystified because they seem to have heard the speaker saying what they conveniently seemed to hear them say.  All communication becomes cross wired, to the ultimate mystification of society. This is Babel revisited. 

The earlier tower of Babel collapsed because of the use of various languages unintelligible to each other[2]. Todays tower of Babel rises by our not being able to hear the other person speaking to us in the same language. And so our towers keep rising to the sky, artificial constructions doomed by the basic lack of respect for ourselves, for God and for each other.

Would we really want to be part of all this?
How can we choose to change?

It requires active and voluntary replacement of bad habits with good ones, ones that remind ourselves to respect the one who is speaking to us enough to allow them to complete what they are saying prior to interjection or premature rebuttal.  How often we do this, little realizing that this actually stems from a crass indifference and disrespect of others and selfish preoccupation with ourselves.

Active listening requires us to listen to what is being said digesting the information both in terms of content and character, interpreting the emotion and content of speech.

Active listening requires us to clarify with the speaker what they are saying so that there is no miscommunication or misinterpretation.

And it demands a fitting reply from the resources we have to allow meaningful communication and a sharing of ideas, not a indifferent spouting of our own convictions regardless of those listening to us.

This new year, may be learn to be quick to listen, and slow to speak[3].


[1] Mathew 13:14

[2] Genesis 11
[3] James 1: 19

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