Listening

Listening came up again and again as 2024 came to a close.

In a brief work meeting, yet one of the most productive meetings of 2024, a colleague used 'listening to respond' in a sentence. This was the third time that week a similar phrase had resonated with me. Just the evening before that meeting I had been listening to this dialogue between Claire Pedrick MCC and Oscar Tromboli who were talking about how to listen.

As a result of the dialogue I subscribed to Oscar Tromboli's Deep Listening Challenge, and was surprised to receive a response from him when I followed the email request at the end of the challenge. It's led me to reflect on my listening skills in different languages, mainly English, Music and Italian.

The placement of music as a language is a new concept for me, but it fits well to my experience. I may be rusty at using it, but as a few chords strummed in my year group's Winter Show proved, it is still a language I enjoy to converse in. After all, I started to dabble with the piano around the age of 4/5, receiving formal lessons from age 5/6 which included a foundation in musicality, not just 'how to play the piano', but how to sing it using solfeggio, talk about it, write it AND read it, and also started clarinet lessons at some point during Primary school too. 

That led me to consider how my piano lessons while living in Pescara were the key to my development of Italian. Without my non-English speaking tutor I would never have had a reason to speak Italian: our conversations about Liszt and hand placement, tone and my love/hate relationship with all things Bach, made learning Italian relevant. Music, I now believe, is embedded within how I listen, regardless of whether I am listening to instrumental music or a dialogue of voices.

When I am most at ease listening I see the shapes of the sounds I hear, rising and falling, a bit like sound waves or the waggly lines that record earthquakes or heart beats. This at times translates into dance, but only the kind reserved for when 'noone is watching'. Listening also has an importance from a faith perspective.

During an Advent Quiet Day, a series of spoken reflections on advent related topics, interspersed with music and silence, the presence of times to listen to the human voice, then a violin, as well as 'silence' felt important. It got me thinking about Jesus and how the four Gospels witness his listening skills. A quick Bible search for the terms 'listen' and 'hear' using my concordance came up short with advice on how to listen, but this blog post showed me how entwined listening is with loving, whether to God, self or others.

Listening is something that is so simple and yet is a catalyst for change and connection when understood and honed to it's full potential. If only I was able to get better at it: perhaps I could finally memorise longer piano pieces, ask better questions in conversations, or understand myself, others and God just that little bit more. That's why I'm starting this year with an inquiry into listening, who knows where it will lead me!