When listening moves you.

There is a time for listening, and there is a time for doing.

I have this notion that our culture is still quite immature, and as a people we need to learn much more how to listen, to listen to each other, to listen to the world, to listen to nature and the subtle energies we sometimes refer to as angels. I see all too much how this lack of listening results in brutish insensitivity, the cold, hard, calculating thrust of the “just get it done” mentality.

_{Interesting side note, the word Brutish is quite similar to the word British… As a British woman, growing up in Britain, I know all too well the cultural stereotype of the “just get it done” mentality.}

But this rather brutish attitude leaves little room for reflective, compassionate listening. Rather, it panders to the reactive, subservient, authoritarian ways of just getting on with it. Business as usual. Don’t be so hysterical dear. Just follow the science. Yes sir, three bags full. Doff the cap, whatever you say governor…

Don’t worry about it, the boffins have it all under control, with their mathematics and their quantum computers… So we should just listen when we’re told to, and do what we’re told. Do we really need to inquire into the subtle interplay of listening and doing? Is there really a natural evolution from listening to doing? Or should we just listen to the experts and then act when we’re told to act? When is the right moment to stop listening and start doing?

Yet this is not really an intellectual type of activity. There’s no algorithm, no calculation for determining exactly when is the right moment to move from listening into doing.

There is a branch of science devoted to studying such questions. But I’m not talking about it from a mathematical perspective. I’m coming to this from the perspective of feeling.

We know when a relationship is over. We don’t measure it, or calculate it, or throw a dice. We feel it.

And there’s a similar process at work when we move from listening to doing. From passive to active. Something grows inside us and as a result action naturally unfolds.

Often we look back and wonder where the action came from, and there’s no real answer to that. We say it was just time, just the right moment, it was just meant to be…

Perhaps a quantum computer could calculate the billions of decision vectors to decode the precise moment of the “when”, but I get the feeling that even then, there would be some puzzle, something unknowable about the whole process. And I’m glad about that. Because if we could know exactly when we were going to act, somehow that knowing would get in the way of the action, and it would interfere with it.

When listening moves effortlessly, authentically, into action. Without premeditated calculation, there is a quality to it that is missing when it’s calculated. The clinical decision lacks a deeper resonance with the whole situation. A connection that is only established when listening moves, naturally into doing.

As a natural listener, I find myself inquiring more into the qualities of “doing”, I’m very interested in the turning point, where inaction becomes action.

Often we associate listening with passivity, but if you’ve done a lot of listening, you know how tiring it can be. There is a very active element to really listening. It involves being truly present, open, responsive. Words that reflect activity.

Our culture is very object, physically oriented, and if someone is not frantically moving about, or showing tremendous amounts of strain, then they’re not working hard enough. They’re not “doing” anything!

We have the idea that the clouds just float in the sky, not doing anything. The flowers just bask in the sun, not doing anything. And the Beas… well they’re busy of course!

So this objectifying of the world has lead to this concept of “activity” vs “inactivity”.

Like I said, it’s rather immature. Just think a little more deeply, and we can see how much activity goes on beneath the surface, without the need for any show of strain or busyness. A tree doesn’t exhaust itself producing apples… Yet we manage to be exhausting the entire worlds resources in our busy endeavour to just survive.

Is seems that in the same way we’ve been trying to force action from ourselves, we’re trying to force the world into giving us all of its gifts at once. Like a spoiled child receiving a present, so eager to tear the paper off. Perhaps the paper was the gift…

We miss so much in our rush to apparent physical action, most notably, the beauty of the sublime discovery that out of listening alone, true action grows.

And any activity in the world not born from the deep qualities of this listening is actually quite brutish and violent in its nature.