PART TWO
Chapter 6
Listening, the Personal Copernican Revolution
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
When I was young, someone taught me what I like to call the 2 ears and 1 mouth strategy: God gave you 2 ears and only 1 mouth, which means you’re meant to listen twice as much as you talk. Now, I don’t claim I learned the lesson, but at least someone tried to teach it to me.
Listening, this is the first use of silence.
Listening is so much harder than it sounds. A good part of the reason is that it’s easy to pretend to listen. There’s a lot we might be doing when we pretend to listen. Waiting to talk, for instance. Forming and reforming an answer in our minds, an answer that will be clever or funny or insightful. Maybe we’re mentally, silently critiquing the person who’s talking—the way they talk, what they’re saying, or how they look. That kind of critique may sound silent, but it still feels just as noisy in our own minds as a vocal shredding ever could. We might even be waiting for a chance to silence the speaker.
True listening, what communication experts call active listening, is so different. It involves a complete, temporary surrender to the other person.[1] We’re not waiting our turn. We’re not forming a clever reply. We’re just . . . listening. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote:
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master at some point, in that I learn from him.[2]
True listening is an act of submission—or, we might say, an active submission—a readiness to hear what is being spoken now, by this person, without any censoring (even mental censoring or refute). It’s a decision to hear someone out, and even to notice what it is they aren’t saying. After all, good listeners pay attention not just to the words they hear, but also to body language and tone of voice, what’s known as nonverbal communication. Did you know that intonation and posture can shape up to 93% of what someone is saying? That means only 7% of some communication is based on the words being chosen and spoken. The rest is waiting to be noticed. Are we listening to that?[3]
Listening is one of those life skills that is so valuable, it can be used for far more than conversations. As I’ve relearned recently with a new child in my home, if we get better at listening to babies, we learn their distinct cries that mean completely different things. If we get better at listening to our cars, we can get fantastic gas mileage, because we’re in tune with the driving actions that make our engine work too hard and the ones that help it feel relaxed. If we get better at listening to our customers, we can figure out how to create ideal relationships with them, and how to sense which prospects will be a good fit. If we get better at listening in our relationships, we understand better how each of us fluctuates day to day like a bend in the river, a bend that can be followed and rejoined, with care.
The better we get at listening, the better we understand. True listening is a flower that blooms only in silence.
A personal Copernican revolution
Why is it so hard for us to listen? I suggest it is because we see ourselves as the center of the universe. I’m not exaggerating. We experience our relationship to the world in similar ways to how people before Copernicus saw the world: we believe everything revolves around us, so therefore, we are more important than anyone or anything else. Our words as a result (even the ones we’re thinking during a conversation) are also more important than anyone else’s words. It sounds hideous when I present it so nakedly, but it’s the cold reality behind the way we fail to respect others’ words at least as much as we respect our own.[4] After all, if we did, we’d listen.
David Foster Wallace confesses this dark underbelly of the human condition eloquently in a commencement speech now known by the title “This is Water”:
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of you or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV or your monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.[5]
Left to our own devices (and sometimes it is literally to our own devices), the world feels like a much smaller place than it is meant to be. It can feel as small as yourself. According to Wallace, operating off our default settings of self-centeredness feels like freedom but ends up as imprisonment, “The freedom all to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.”
So, what can we do to challenge our deception that we’re the center of the universe? Listen. Listen well, and listen often. It’s not going to feel natural, but it’s going to be our own kind of Copernican revolution, the moments when we start to see the world truly, and our place in it. Listening keeps us sane by waking us up to our actual role in the universe: we’re not the center, and we never were. We’re also not the major character. We’re a wonderfully-drawn minor character, just like every other human being. When we listen, we’re not only reminding ourselves of our true place in the universe, but we’re also practicing that Copernican revolution too—practicing our place.
Arthur and Elaine Aron, researchers at Stony Brook University, have been particularly interested in the science and psychology of listening across their multiple decades of research. Their most famous research project involves a list of 36 questions designed to measure just what’s possible during listening. When any two people—all strangers before the experiment, mind you—talk out (and listen out) their answers to these questions, they feel measurably better about one another and even want to see each other again. The Arons concluded that the act of listening to what these questions explore actually generates intimacy or even love. So, what are these questions that stimulate listening, and reward it too? Here they are:[6]
Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
Would you like to be famous? In what way?
Before making a phone call, do you ever rehearse what you’re going to say. Why?
What would constitute a perfect day for you?
When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you choose?
Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
If you could wake up tomorrow having gained one quality or ability, what would it be?
If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
Is there something that you’ve dreamt of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
What do you value most in a friendship?
What is your most treasured memory?
What is your most terrible memory?
If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
What does friendship mean to you?
What roles to love and affection play in your life?
Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?
How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
Make three true “we” statements. For instance, “we are both in this room feeling . . .”
Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share . . . “
If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.
Tell your partner what you like about them. Be honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.
Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
Tell your partner something that you like about them already.
What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? What haven’t you told them yet?
Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
The beauty of these questions is not just that they allow another person to truly listen to you as you really are; they also give you a stethoscope to listen to yourself—as author and minister Frederick Buechner might say, to “listen to your life.”[7] Time spent with these kinds of questions would do anyone good, which is exactly the kind of thing you can gain from listening to someone else in general, and having them listen to you.
“When I came in towards the end of each set of questions,” Arthur Aron remembers, “there were people crying and talking so openly. It was amazing. They all seemed really moved by it.”[8] Of course, not just any random question will create the same effect, but the Arons were seeking to prove something when they set up this experiment. They were seeing if we could learn how to listen. And the answer is: yes, we most certainly can.
Listening sometimes doesn’t need any dialogue at all. Even if you’re a beginner, if you’re willing to listen, it might look like truly seeing someone else, and helping them feel seen and known, appreciated and safe.
This is exactly what Amnesty International Poland demonstrated, some twenty years after the 36 Questions discoveries. In 2016, they were inspired by another of the Arons’ findings, the discovery that four minutes of looking into each other’s eyes can bring two people closer. So, in the wake of refugee arrivals into Europe, they brought pairs of people together, having asked them in advance to look into each other’s eyes for four minutes—which most of them did in total silence.[9]
What the participants didn’t discover until after their four minutes had elapsed is that each pair was composed of one European resident and one recent refugee. In the meanwhile, they laughed. They cried. They squirmed. They admired one another. They averted their gaze in shame or in the vulnerable terror of being seen perhaps for the first time, and then, gradually, they returned their gaze to the safety of the other person’s eyes. They became, in nearly every case, friends. Not just friendly, but friends. All this was facilitated, made easier, through silence.
Other people are both like us and not like us. This is one of the reasons the silence of listening can be intimidating, vulnerable. It is also why listening can be so rewarding. Each of us is human differently, and that difference doesn’t give itself up without patience, patience, patience . . . and listening.
Listening without an agenda
In 1952, the experimental composer John Cage published a piece of music “for any instrument or combination of instruments.” However, the sheet music was printed exactly the same for every configuration of instruments. That is because the staves on the sheet music were blank. The piece has a specific number of bars printed on the page, and a definite length of time it is meant to last. But not a single note. The piece is called “4 minutes and 33 seconds.” (Curious, isn’t it, that this is nearly the same stretch of time the Arons would go on to discover some forty years later?)[10]
At the time it was released, 4’33” caused a great deal of controversy. Was Cage having a laugh at our expense? Was he simply cheating and publishing a piece of music without any effort at all? Well, perhaps. But more importantly, for someone like Cage—a man obsessed with the idea that any sound (even noise) is potentially music—he was trying to get us to do something unfamiliar, something people rarely give themselves permission to do, even when they go to a concert hall. He was inviting us to listen.
4’33” welcomes its audience, in each performance, to discover the natural noise and music inherent in the concert hall itself, or in any space where a group assembles to listen during this piece (instead of to it). That natural music includes the sounds that happen among the concert-goers themselves. That uncontrolled sneeze. That little girl shuffling in her seat. The natural noises we missed or ignored or hissed at in our minds while listening for something else, something more official we thought we were supposed to be listening for. Every time this piece is performed, the silence of the instruments is exactly the same, but the resulting sounds are unique. We become aware of our actual environment, those people just as real as us that are around us, those sounds we didn’t create but that someone else did. We’re reminded of our orbit, and the reality that we’re not the center of the universe.
This piece provokes, as silence often does, a variety of reactions: laughter, incomprehension, discomfort, even profound and sudden grief. It may be the easiest piece for orchestra ever written, but that doesn’t make it any easier for the audience to experience.
Curiously enough, Cage told an interviewer in 1963 that he had been inspired to create this piece of music after a visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard University.
"In that room, I heard two sounds, whereas I expected to hear nothing," Cage said. "So when I got out of the room, I asked the engineer what those two sounds were. One was high and one was low. And he said, 'Well, the high one was your nervous system in operation. And the low one was the circulation of your blood.' Therefore, even if I remain silent, I was, under certain circumstances, musical."[11]
Cage, a composer who was already unusually dedicated to the art of listening, had put his reps in. His muscles of using silence were strong. He was even famously convinced that any sound could potentially be experienced as music. So when he entered an immersion of silence in the anechoic chamber, one that had already overwhelmed others with vulnerability and deprivation, he experienced it—and himself—as music. Since he had learned how to listen, he had the ears to hear it.
Learning how to listen
What if there were a person who were the actual center of the universe? Wouldn’t they have the right to talk without listening? To treat others as less significant? To be the opposite of curious? One would assume. Well, when God shows up in human history—audibly, I mean—he’s only rarely loud and booming, as if he’s in a Charlton Heston movie. Here’s the prophet Elijah’s experience, for instance, as it’s recorded in the first book of Kings:
“Go out and stand before me on the mountain,” the Lord told him.
And as Elijah stood there, the Lord passed by, and a mighty windstorm hit the mountain. It was such a terrible blast that the rocks were torn loose, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire there was the sound of a gentle whisper.
When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.
And a voice said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”[12]
The one who could simply command our attention through Wizard of Oz pyrotechnics instead prefers to whisper, to teach us listening by giving us silence. We get the same impression about the Spirit of God, who’s introduced in Genesis 1 as hovering over the face of the unformed waters, about as descriptive of a barely audible whir (and investigative listening) as you could imagine. The Spirit is later described as communicating so softly to us that it’s quite possible to “quench” or “extinguish” the voice with our own noise pollution.[13]
It should come as no surprise that our own experience of silent listening can become so fulfilling, so enriching, can feel so ‘right.’ We come by it honestly. It’s the true normal.
The Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard is one of our era’s most gifted writers, and also a gifted listener. She is especially attuned to nature and, in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, she leads us gently by the hand with her words, showing us the steps toward better listening of any kind:
At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same.
This is it: this hum is the silence.[14]
This first use of silence, listening, enables you to hear what’s there, and who is there. It empowers you to hear what’s possible—the potential. To hear what’s wrong. It even allows you to connect, because the silence you share with a good friend knits you together. Mostly, it reminds you that you’re not the center of the universe, but that nevertheless you get to participate in this life, this story, all the same. It grounds you in a way that helps you grow.
It is a start.
[1] An introduction to “active listening” can be found here: https://www.usip.org/public-education/educators/what-active-listening.
[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thoughts about listening as submission can be found in his section on “Greatness,” excerpted from his Complete Works here: https://www.bartleby.com/90/0810.html.
[3] An overview of nonverbal communication and studies into its effects on verbal communication, can be seen here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-words/201109/is-nonverbal-communication-numbers-game.
[4] An introduction to the Copernican Revolution can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution.
[5] A transcript and audio version of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, now known as “This is Water,” can be found here: https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/.
[6] Though the results of Arthur and Elaine Aron’s research into “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness” was first published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 1997, it was revisited, described, and popularized through an online article in Psychology Today by Temma Ehrenfeld, entitled “36 Questions to Bring You Closer Together,” which can be read here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/open-gently/201310/36-questions-bring-you-closer-together.
[7] Buechner, Frederick. Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner. Compiled by George Connor. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1992.
[8] A description of the 36 Questions experiment, as well as Arthur Aron’s comments about his observations during it, can be found at https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/02/12/love-in-the-lab/.
[9] The Arons’ discovery of four minutes of eye contact is discussed in a New York Times article here https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/style/modern-love-to-fall-in-love-with-anyone-do-this.html, and the refugee video created by Amnesty International Poland, entitled “Look Beyond Borders - 4 minutes experiment” can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypLjsxHVElQ.
[10] An overview of John Cage’s “4 minutes and 33 seconds” can be found here: https://www.britannica.com/topic/433-by-Cage and here: https://www.npr.org/2012/09/05/160618202/music-is-everywhere-john-cage-at-100.
[11] Cage’s comments to a 1963 interviewer about his experience in an anechoic chamber are recorded in https://www.npr.org/2012/09/05/160618202/music-is-everywhere-john-cage-at-100.
[12] This passage about Elijah and the voice of God from the first book of Kings can be found here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Kings+19%3A11-13&version=NLT.
[13] The Spirit as depicted in Genesis 1 can be found here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1&version=NLT, and the description of how the Spirit’s voice might be “quenched” can be found here: https://biblehub.com/1_thessalonians/5-19.htm.
[14] Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. 89-90.
Selah
I welcome you into an experiment. It shouldn’t take long. It will be good practice.
Find your journal, or something to write in.
Set a timer for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. If possible, choose a gentle tone to signal that your time’s up. (That way you won’t experience so much whiplash.)
Start the timer.
Now, close your eyes, and listen.
It’s going to feel long, so go ahead and give yourself permission to forget that there even is a timer.
Just . . . listen.Once your timer has signaled that 4 minutes and 33 seconds have passed, write down what you heard while you listened. And how you felt during the silence.
Your Turn
You are at a unique place in your unique life. Which is to say, there is a particular way this last chapter connected with you. I imagine, however, that there is a way you could listen to this chapter by acting on it. So I offer the following suggestions as small, but intentional actions to consider trying on for yourself:
Identify which bad habit you’re practicing while pretending to listen (waiting to speak, critiquing the speaker, etc). Write it down. Tell it to a loved one.
When you’re listening, start focusing only on the other person and what they’re saying, instead of your old habit. Make this focus your new habit.
Begin practicing the 3-second rule when you’re in a conversation: wait for 3 seconds after the other person has finished speaking before you respond. You’ll notice that this seems too long when you’re unused to it, but it also relaxes the vibe between you and gives plenty of space for the other person to finish their thought.
If you’re feeling brave, ask a loved one if you can practice four minutes of silent eye contact. Talk about it afterwards: what you noticed, how you felt, how you feel.
Or suggest that you try out the 36 questions the Arons recommend for increasing intimacy or closer friendship. As a small step, try just one of them!
If you drive on a regular basis, practice listening to your car and see if you can improve your gas mileage by picking up on how the car wants to drive.
Practice paying attention to a conversation partner’s nonverbal cues. If you’re in a close enough relationship, ask permission to share what you noticed and see if you have understood their emotions as well as their words.