The Art Of Listening — How Never To Be Bothered By Anyone

If you’re like me, not that you should be, you don’t like arguments.

At the time of writing this “piece,” the world is facing consequent challenges. We think it’s worse where we live, but the truth is that, everyone is facing their own personal, and collective crisis.

While we keep spending much of the scarce, precious time and resources we have left — trying to figure out as fast as we can, how to handle and properly deal with all this madness — we don’t seem to make much progress.

We could say that, we’re being careful, that we’re analyzing all possible outcomes, and doing the best we can. This is what we say, even if it isn’t exactly what we see.

Whether it’s happening at a personal level; between us and friends as an example, or whether it’s happening at a global level, between us and others in charge of leading the world to a brighter future — whatever the situation is, it doesn’t feel like we communicate. And whatever the outcome, our need to keep preparing ourselves for the worst exposes the fact that we’ve not fully solved the problem.

Right after our conversation with people, we’re always reviewing the entire event. If we didn’t express ourselves enough, what we still have to say preoccupies our mind. And if we did express ourselves enough, we fear that we may have stepped over others’ boundaries.

There is a reason why everything is always perfect in our mind, but rarely so in the real world, and that’s because while we speak to each other — we’re focused on what we want to say next; we’re playing ping-pong with our ideas and slowly but surely — the conversation’s main focus shifts from being about dealing with the problem at hand, to appearing better, bigger, and brighter.

We’re burdened by our knowledge. We take pride in our opinions. We base our understanding of the world on books, “authorities,” and then go on to believe that this knowledge is ours. What we don’t realize in doing this is that, having so many assumptions about the world disconnects us from it.

And while we may easily fool ourselves, and others, into believing that we’re here to “save” the world — what we’re wanting to do save is our pompous egos. We want to look powerful, smarter, stronger, more attractive — and in trying so hard to prove a point — we’re only exposing how deeply insecure we are.

We’re unsure about everything. We tie ourselves to concepts, theories, beliefs, which makes us feel secure. This mental gymnastic creates a self-image; one that needs nurturing in order to exist, and therefore we keep protecting it by arguing with people, or augmenting it by seeking admiration, using impressive but useless words, or wearing expensive brands.

We’re taught from an early age to look outside ourselves. We’re told that, the problems of the world come from the government, from a certain country, and without realizing it — we forget to be responsible for ourselves, and we put everything on what’s outside of us.

Because we’ve had the habit of not questioning our ways for eons, we create more and more problems, that require more and more from us. And while creating fancy presentations and putting more money into expensive but useless offices, cars and departments may have its use — what’s vital to our wellbeing, on our planet — is to give space to each other, enough space so that each one of us is heard.

We like to pride ourselves about our gender today. But what’s more important than the biological predisposition of our body is, understanding the fact that ultimately, we’re genderless — whether we’re a woman, or a man, we all know how to plan things (masculine) and love (feminine) people, Nature, the night sky, et cetera. The masculine and the feminine exist simultaneously in every one of us.

But, like with a muscle that has not been used for a while, our feminine aspect needs some exercise. The last centuries have been dominated by the brain, rarely by the heart.

We’ve forgotten how to listen, how to be open, how to be compassionate.

Some of us are reawakening these “latent abilities” because we realize how much the world needs it. Our old ways are not well equipped to respond to our current challenges.

We’re human beings. We embody a vast array of possibilities. We contain an immeasurable potential. But it’s our responsibility, to turn potentiality, into actuality.