On Listening

Accept the first thought, says Keith Johnston. Don’t try to be clever, don’t try to be original, don’t try to be anything. Just accept the first thought.

So I will.

I understand something important about writing, about why I’m in a funk. And I think it’s useful to you as well potentially.

It’s really simple.

Writing isn’t self-expression, not in the way in which I do it.

Writing is listening.

At its best, when it feels most real, when it is most real, I am not writing, if that word suggests an agent who chooses words and their order. I am more or less taking dictation. I am quiet and still and something inside speaks and I do my best to get out of the way and let it speak.

And my funk with writing, my general funk with life - these come from the same place, are the same thing.

I have stopped listening.

My world has narrowed. I am no longer present to the sun and the trees. I don’t read great books, I don’t spend a fleeting eternal moment smiling into Annika’s eyes.

I sit here in this cafe with the barking dog and the wrinkly pensioners, the morning sun clear and weak, and I am not here. I am somewhere else.

I am not listening and I am not fed.

Do we need to make something grand out of this? No, we do not. We could, but we don’t need to. It’s all rather simple.

To live, for me, is to listen.

Everything else is downstream of that. Everything.

(Lol, I just did make something grand out of it. Blame Keith. I’m just accepting the first thought.)

All progress in my life has required one condition: being where I am.

Incredibly, that’s often all it’s needed. A full acceptance of the current condition, complete presence to life as it currently is.

What is my current condition? I won’t put it in words, because it can’t fully be captured by words. Words are only one mode of apprehending the world, and they are very dangerous. Words create two illusions. One, they make us think that we know something, that we are experiencing something, when really, all we are doing is manipulating symbols that we have assigned meaning to. Two, I have forgotten what two was, but it was very good.

Listen.

Nothing else is needed. To listen, to truly listen, is to be let into the stream of life, a stream that is endlessly creative and generative and true.

The difficulty is to listen.

This is why religious traditions have always advised silencing desire; more precisely, they have advised cultivating a certain kind of relationship to our desires. This is why the ego is a thing that half-baked charlatans tell us to kill. This is why the fundamental technique of human transformation has always been silence. This is why monasteries have rigid routines and shut out the external world. All of it is about one thing and one thing alone - helping us listen, making it easier to listen, making listening unavoidable.

I am trying to listen now. It’s interesting. It always begins for me in my breast, a movement, a gurgle, a turmoil, an energy. And right now part of the challenge is not giving words to it, not fixing it and freezing it, letting it speak in its language rather than imposing mine on it.

It is an incredible thing, this world inside, this world outside, this world I am listening to, this world that is speaking in you and in me and in all of us. It is quiet, it rarely forces itself upon us. It is continually ignored. And yet it never gives up, it is never far away. It is almost moving, how eager it is to be heard, how much insult and injury it puts up with, how it always returns with love, always willing to speak with us and to us and through us, if only we let it.