Listening to Give – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

Listen to be heard. Simple as it sounds, listening has always been one of the best forms of empathy we can offer someone. Why is listening so hard these days (or was it always)? Part of the answer, I think, is how distracted we live, forever drifting between thoughts of the future and the past. The other part is a restless need to look outside for answers to something that comes from within. Listening may be one of our main sources of answers.

The best gift is being able to know and understand what someone is trying to tell us. Think of how fully we can take in a book when we switch off every distraction and give the author our complete attention. Yet that kind of attention feels almost impossible, especially in a world flooded with information. We’re reaching a point where we fail to grasp things, and the cause is less a lack of understanding than the level of distraction we’ve signed up for, consciously and unconsciously.

Listening takes constant practice. It’s a genuine trust in questions over opinions or judgments. It opens unexplored paths in our minds and gives us more answers to the questions we carry. We’re flooded with thoughts, many of them circling deeply honest questions about our existence and the meaning of our lives. Those answers will come mostly from within, to the extent that we learn to listen to others and understand their points of view and what moves them to make certain decisions or take certain paths.

Listening and reflecting until we internalize something, and finally find the answer we were looking for, takes much more energy than talking for the sake of talking. It’s usually cheaper, in energy terms, to hand our thinking to someone else, which partly explains why we spend more time (though less energy) looking for answers in others than in ourselves. I’m not advocating individualism or forgetting that good advice and lessons also come from outside. Still, life is a road we all travel and build at the same time. No two roads are alike, just as no two lives are alike, and there are as many roads as there are lives.

Listening along the way may be one of the best tools life has given us. Purpose, which I love to write about and live by, doesn’t come from outside. Discovering our purpose means reaching a point where we can listen to ourselves so deeply that we finally see why we’re here. The best favor we can start doing tomorrow is to trade our words for questions, to turn our interest toward what others want or try to tell us, and to stay quiet long enough to hear ourselves, perhaps for the first time.

Warm regards,

Rodrigo Baccaro

• P.S. This week’s VELA (what I was Watching, Listening to, Reading and Learning):
• What I was Watching: There’s more to life than being happy. A great TED talk my friend Francisco (Chico) Corzo shared with me. What stood out was how focusing on several things beyond happiness alone is what leads us to find meaning in life and true happiness
  – What I was Listening to: La historia grande. Possibly one of the best talks I’ve heard on the origin of the universe up to today. Well worth it
  – What I was Reading: La conquista de América contada para escépticos. A wonderful book that landed in my hands. This week I deplored the vandalism that destroyed, and tried to destroy, my country’s cultural heritage. Sadly, these are signs of cultural decline, and the way to prevent it is to read and study the conquest, the many conquests and the evolution of the world objectively, judging history by the standards of its own time
  – What I was Learning: Life and work of Albert Einstein. A very special piece on YouTube that taught me a lot. I’ve always admired Einstein’s legacy to humanity (as with many scientists who have caught my attention), and I especially liked the main character who tells the story of the famous scientist’s life and work

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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