I had an ephiphany today. At 8am.
It was inspired by a tiny blurb on the "Positivity" feed I wake up to every morning. This morning's post was a quote from Rachel Naomi Remen - a doctor who's battled Crohn's disease for the past 48 years, and worked to reform the medicine into a holistic practice.
She said:
"The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention...A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words."
I sat back sleepily for a moment and thought about this, my space heater whirring as I spun slowly in the chair at my desk. Am I a good listener? "Of course!" I thought. It's something that I make a conscious effort to do everyday...and it's like people just know that I'm a sponge for their purging. People have shared things with me before - secrets, both joyous and tragic - that I've felt surprised yet honored to be entrusted with. But is this sense of trust fostered because I'm a good listener? Have I ever responded to someone's confessions, dreams, or desires with loving silence? What even is "loving silence"? Couldn't that get horribly construed somehow? Misunderstood as indifference?
Sighing, my internal volleying unresolved, I got up and sprawled myself across my bed, propping myself up with a pillow, and grabbing my book. I'll admit that with all the reading I'm required to do I've resorted to speed reading, aka skimming the text looking for key words and thematic elements that are good class discussion starters or paper topics. It's become a key survival skill in college.
That being said, as I began reading Animal's People by Indra Sinha, I realized this wasn't a book I wanted to rush through - that as I passed the 30 page mark, then 55, then 80 in the span of about two hours, my painfully slow progression through the novel gave me more time to understand the deeper meanings of the lesson the author was trying to teach. I highlighted things, I underlined my favorite passages, I even laughed at the subtle humor that I would have normally missed had I flown through the words without looking for their soul. It's been so long since I've slowed down to actually listen to a narrator's story. It frightens me how good I've gotten at hunting out the linguistic cues, the kernals of contradiction, and the forumulaic mechanisms that give novels structure. But that's not what reading is about.
The act of reading is in fact an act of listening. When you take the time to hear out the narrator through to the end, there becomes less of an urge to interject in ways that cause you to alienate yourself from the whole literary experience. Perhaps, to listen with "loving silence" then is to pause long enough to attempt understanding on ones own accord. Because we, as readers, cannot confront authors directly, we must learn to listen with such "loving silence," or risk gutting the very books that attempt to reveal the most complex parts of our humanity.
It was inspired by a tiny blurb on the "Positivity" feed I wake up to every morning. This morning's post was a quote from Rachel Naomi Remen - a doctor who's battled Crohn's disease for the past 48 years, and worked to reform the medicine into a holistic practice.
She said:
"The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention...A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words."
I sat back sleepily for a moment and thought about this, my space heater whirring as I spun slowly in the chair at my desk. Am I a good listener? "Of course!" I thought. It's something that I make a conscious effort to do everyday...and it's like people just know that I'm a sponge for their purging. People have shared things with me before - secrets, both joyous and tragic - that I've felt surprised yet honored to be entrusted with. But is this sense of trust fostered because I'm a good listener? Have I ever responded to someone's confessions, dreams, or desires with loving silence? What even is "loving silence"? Couldn't that get horribly construed somehow? Misunderstood as indifference?
Sighing, my internal volleying unresolved, I got up and sprawled myself across my bed, propping myself up with a pillow, and grabbing my book. I'll admit that with all the reading I'm required to do I've resorted to speed reading, aka skimming the text looking for key words and thematic elements that are good class discussion starters or paper topics. It's become a key survival skill in college.
That being said, as I began reading Animal's People by Indra Sinha, I realized this wasn't a book I wanted to rush through - that as I passed the 30 page mark, then 55, then 80 in the span of about two hours, my painfully slow progression through the novel gave me more time to understand the deeper meanings of the lesson the author was trying to teach. I highlighted things, I underlined my favorite passages, I even laughed at the subtle humor that I would have normally missed had I flown through the words without looking for their soul. It's been so long since I've slowed down to actually listen to a narrator's story. It frightens me how good I've gotten at hunting out the linguistic cues, the kernals of contradiction, and the forumulaic mechanisms that give novels structure. But that's not what reading is about.
The act of reading is in fact an act of listening. When you take the time to hear out the narrator through to the end, there becomes less of an urge to interject in ways that cause you to alienate yourself from the whole literary experience. Perhaps, to listen with "loving silence" then is to pause long enough to attempt understanding on ones own accord. Because we, as readers, cannot confront authors directly, we must learn to listen with such "loving silence," or risk gutting the very books that attempt to reveal the most complex parts of our humanity.
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