The importance of knowing how to listen, in the chaos of words that surrounds us.

For Plutarch It's an art, the art of listening. And if that were really the case, we could say we've lost it, incapable as we have become of making the effort to listen—the active kind, which leads to knowledge, and not the passive kind, which it boils down to a polite formula.

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LISTEN

Listening is an exercise that presupposes other exercises. Simple gestures, which over time become automatic. But to truly listen, we must be able to pay attention. to doubt, don't be in a hurry to draw conclusions that might not even be useful, get involved. Those who listen are like explorers: moved by Curiosity, he is unable to know in advance where his research will lead him. But this does not stop him, on the contrary it stimulates him. And those who listen love paradox, irony, lightnessWe all talk, we often shout, but almost no one listensIt is one of the paradoxes of modernity: we have multiplied the sources of language, we made them viral, everyone feels free to express an opinion, to give judgments in a flurry, even on subjects of which he is completely ignorant, but the number of people willing to listen is decreasing. Contrary to what the wise man urged us to do Plutarch, author of a long seller entitled The art of listening: «We have two ears and only one mouth, precisely because we need to listen more and speak less».

THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING HOW TO LISTEN

Losing hearing is a great wasteIn public life: it is impossible to govern well, to make the right decisions at the right time, without listening to those who elected you (and even those who did not vote for you) and without engaging with the reasons of your opponents. family: without listening it is impossible to give longevity, long breath, future, to a marital relationship and the delicate family balance. The first ones who ask us to listen are our children: not doing so means losing them along the way. In everyday relationships, in the community life that each of us spends within relationships whose quality is founded on listening. If it's present, relationships work; if it's missing, relationships wither or turn into fights. Knowing to listen It also means being silent to think, reflect on what you're hearing. And then perhaps respond. A silence that isn't passive, because in that moment you're talking to yourself.

ALSO READ: Thus lives crushed by the present become lives without listening: the story in this book

LISTEN TO THE OTHER

A large portion of condominium conflicts, an endemic evil of a quarrelsome town, arise precisely from the inability to listen to the reasons, even the most trivial, of a neighbor. If he doesn't love the dogs, for example, we will also have to listen to his reasons and pay particular attention to our life companion's needs and barking. Being together, everywhere, from a building to a family, from a sports club to a company, means first of all listening. And not just speaking, as if each of our words were taken from the Gospel.

But where does this come from? mass autismSince when did we stop listening? And what are the causes of such widespread isolation? I'd start with a premise: listening isn't easy. It requires the ear, the eye, and the heart to work together, and therefore it's a kind of exercise that engages the entire person. Consider your ear: how do you listen in the age of chronic noise? We need silence to hear, and yet we are surrounded by deafening noises. Even in religious services, it is silence, contemplation, that brings us closer to the Other, to a dimension beyond the earthly. We have become accustomed to living surrounded by noise, and with silence we have also lost the background music necessary for listening.

LISTENING VALUE

Then listening means to free oneself from a series of constraints and prejudices which are instead growing out of all proportion, also due to the virality of the web, which gives everyone the opportunity to cultivate and express them. Dogmatism, sterile cynicism, relativism, beliefs that spread like false truths. These are all viruses that pollute listening. They nullify the desire, they kill its power, in its infancy, at the source. A very nice uncle of mine, when he found himself conversing with someone who was talking to himself, with convictions and edicts, would suddenly dismiss him with this quip: "I understand, when you're done speaking, turn off the light..." It was a withering phrase that put the interlocutor, with his autism and his self-referentiality.

Listening means not accepting the simplifications of slogansAnd it means not speaking with clichés, rhetoric, to the gut rather than the brain and heart. The more we distort language, degrading it to insult and simplification, the more we reduce the means of listening. And we risk talking, or insulting, ourselves. When reality is complex, and this often happens, even in the realm of feelings, one way to avoid it is to "not want to listen to reason," that is, to withdraw into one's own ego, perhaps a user ego, and not accept any form of confrontation with the We. Thus missing a great opportunity, because, as he said, Leonardo Da Vinci, know listening "means possessing, in addition to one's own, also the brains of others". And therefore multiply energy, dreams, ambitions, ideas. You do not fail to notice that the mechanism of listening also presupposes an unlimited use of the resource of humility: if you have thearrogance If you feel like a bearer of absolute truth, you'll hardly be able to simply listen to the arguments of others, which aren't always unfounded. And in any case, they can't be unfounded a priori, and as such, unlistenable. Obviously, listening isn't a passive surrender to the arguments of others, it's not the constant forgiveness of wrongs suffered, it's not the defeat of one's own ideas. If anything, it's the verification of their validity: we cannot listen, as if they were understandable and justifiable, to the ideas of Islamic terrorists who think they can solve problems by killing innocent people and depriving life of any value.

TO KNOW MORE: Discover the pleasures and well-being that kindness brings. Your health improves.

Finally listening is a page of etiquetteVery stringent. To listen, you need to be an open, educated person, capable of learning and understanding. A rude person has no chance of accessing listening. And so listening, as the writer and psychiatrist writes in a beautiful book dedicated to its value, Eugenio Borgna It is, by definition, "kind." Yes, but kindness is like silence: a virtue lost in the chaotic age of the new modernity.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO KNOW HOW TO LISTEN?

Knowing how to listen means many things, but one above all: being able to absorb knowledge. From anyone who has it to share. The psychiatrist William Glasser has established, in terms of percentages, what let's learn through the various forms of listening, both written and spoken. And he reached these quantitative conclusions: we learn 10 percent from what we read, 20 percent from what we hear, 30 percent from what we see, 50 percent from what we see and hear, 70 percent from what we discuss, 80 percent from what we experience firsthand, and 95 percent from what we teach. As you can see from these numbers, listening produces better results when combined with discussion, and therefore with comparing the opinions of others, through conversazione, and first-hand experience.

LISTEN TO FAMOUS QUOTES

«A great many people have a furious itch to talk about themselves, and are only held back by the disinclination of others to listen.» William Somerset Maugham

The domination of the Internet, the abuse of social media as a tool for self-promotion, the disease of presenteeism, have exponentially increased the natural "itch" to speak. Even when it's useless, inappropriate, or vacuous. In this case, the poor inclination to listen, another side of the same coin, comes to our aid, and in fact curbs the frenzy of others spewing words into the wind.

«Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.» Winston Churchill

Churchill was a politician, a statesman, and a writer who knew how to listen. He loved speaking in public, and did so with theatrical flair. His experience, and also his culture, allowed him to understand. the relationship between words and courage. So there are moments in which you have to overcome fear and speak up, to say it, even if it's uncomfortable. Just as there are other moments in which the courage is to be silent in order to listen.

«To love means above all to listen in silence» Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If you know couples, especially elderly people, who exchange gestures of love with their silent glances, with a simple caress, you understand well what the relationship between love, silence and listening. And how many words, instead, are wasted invoking a love that doesn't exist.

«To speak is for fools, to remain silent is for cowards, to listen is for wise men.» Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Listening is a demonstration of intelligence, as well as humility. Talking too much, and nonsense, is instead the indelible mark of one's own stupidity.

THE VALUE OF SILENCE EVEN IN RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS

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