Close Your Mouth and Open Your Heart

There was a year that I spent teaching English as a second language. It is my first language, but I learnt a lot about English when I had to teach it to non-English speakers. One of the things that stands out is when I had to explain the difference between “hearing” and “listening”. I had never really thought about it before. Hearing is one of the five senses that human beings have. When you sense a noise, you hear it. The nerves in your ears send a message to your brain, which tells you you heard a sound. This is an involuntary action. If you are awake and there is a loud-enough noise, you will hear it. Listening, however, is a conscious, voluntary action. You take what you’ve heard and interpret, analyse or make an effort to understand what it means. For example, as I write this, in the background I hear noises but when I listen to what they are, I realise that they are footsteps, the low hum of the fridge, a fountain and some traffic.

These days there is a lot of noise. People want to not only be heard, but understood and listened to…. but who’s listening? If we are screaming and shouting, with everyone else who is screaming and shouting, there is a lot of noise and a lot of confusion. Who is listening? We’re not listening to each other because we’re all making a noise at the same time.

Wouldn’t it make sense, if you want to be heard, understood and listened to, that you in turn, listen to others? If we all made an effort to listen to each other, then we would also be heard and listened to when we speak out.

Many people who stand for a cause, assume that those who don’t stand with them, by default, must stand against them. This makes them more heated and determined in their cause. Why do we think like that? We should be looking for commonality and humanity in each other. We all have fears, insecurities, hopes and dreams. If we recognise that in each other, we most probably will find that we have more in common than we realise.

There are a lot of protests these days about how people are handling Covid-19, politics, racism, gender-based violence etc. Not everyone is listening to each other’s concerns. They are just trying to shout louder than the other so that they will be heard. If one listens, when others speak, one too will get a chance to speak. This is how discussions take place and how progress is made. Shouting loudly, to drown out the voices of others, only fuels anger and bears no results because there is just noise. Most of us want the same or similar things. We might each have our own paths, experiences and perspectives of life, but let’s see if we can also find a common path; not yours or mine, but a new one that we can take together.

We can speak out, but let’s listen too. It helps to cut down on the noise.