Speaking with the Heart and Listening with the Mind

 

‘The art of conversation’ might be an old phrase, almost cliched but time-tested. At its simplest, a conversation requires at least two people to speak and listen in turn. But it becomes an art when the two are interested in what the other has to say and wish to come away enriched at the end of the conversation.

While speaking and listening are two integral parts of a conversation, listening somehow takes precedence for a conversation to be truly enjoyable. More than a skill, it is, in fact, an art that is honed with time. But one needs to stop and observe this art before desiring to master it.

We live in times when we want to become performers, vying for those 30 seconds of attention as it were. And we rarely come across people who can listen. This scarcity of listeners perhaps stems from the fact that many of us are lonely, stuck in a hamster’s wheel of routines. As a living, breathing, thinking species, we have so much to say, with barely anyone having the mindspace to listen. Of course, most of us have been both listeners and speakers depending on where we were in life… times when we longed to be heard and times when we listened with patience.

Oftentimes, those who struggle to listen do not have the vile intention of hogging the limelight but a hunger to be heard. Now, this hunger creates what I would call the ‘speed talker’. We’ve all met one. You meet them at the coffee machine and ask them how they’re doing, and by the time you’ve stirred your coffee, they’ve already stirred up three chapters of their life, and only then ask how you’ve been—if at all.

A speed talker, as only a patient listener would know, is always in a race. What if the listener loses attention? What if there is no second chance? The anxiety is perhaps less about being heard and more about not being heard. The talkers somehow manage to pull a thread out of the listener’s muslin inputs and spin a tarpaulin of their own. The listener’s thoughts get folded and tucked away unnoticed. The listener says, “I’m learning to play the ukulele,” and the speaker takes off, “Really? Do you know the Ukulele originated in Hawaii? I’ll never forget my trip to Hawaii. What a disaster it was! But then we travelled back via Japan…!” By now, the circumnavigation is well underway.

The listener eventually sits back and gives up participating in this phantom conversation—sometimes out of genuine interest in the speaker, sometimes out of self-doubt and often out of weariness. The self-doubt comes when the listener begins to believe that their thoughts and ideas can never be as important or colourful as the speaker’s own.              

The speakers, be it the boastful or the mournful kind, always have a way to make the conversation about themselves. Picture this. A small group of friends meet up after years, each with several years of a rich life behind them. But one of them becomes a self-appointed TedX speaker and makes the evening all about what they do, how life has shaped them, their criticisms, their opinions and so on. The listeners at the end of the meeting come away often feeling tired and empty, wondering if they were even required for the conversation to happen.

What is required for a conversation to be rich is perhaps not words but pauses. Pauses to listen, to ask each other questions. These pauses breathe life into the conversation and show that one cares. A good listener grants dignity to another’s story; a mindful speaker offers a thread worth holding. When both meet, conversation ceases to be a mere exchange but becomes meaningful time spent.

Pic Courtesy: La Conversación by Étienne Pirot (Etienne), Plaza de San Francisco by Havana Abderrahman Ait Ali, via Wikimedia Commons