Possibly the most beautiful gift we can offer to someone is to listen to them.
That is to say to them, not in words, but with our eyes, our face, our smile, our body language: you are important to me, I find you interesting, I’m happy that you are here, you will enhance my life, since you are what I am not.
It is no surprise finding that we can learn about ourselves when someone listens to us!
To listen is, first of all, to be quiet.
Have you noticed how many “conversations” are full of expressions like “that reminds me of what happened when I…” or “that reminds me of what happened to me…”
It often happens that, what someone else has to say, simply becomes an opportunity for me to talk about myself.
In order to listen we must begin by stopping our own internal cinema, our mobile monologue, in order to make living space for the other person. It is to allow the other to come into our lives just as they might come to our home or stay for a while and relax.
Listening is really a matter of dropping all that occupies our minds so that we can give time to the other person.
It’s like going for a walk with a friend: walking at their pace; close to them but not crowding them; allowing ourselves to be guided by them, stopping with them, setting off with them whenever they feel like it.
Listening means not finding a reply to what the other person says; knowing that they have within themselves the answers to their own questions.
It means refusing to think in place of the other person, offering them advice and even wanting to understand them. Like going for a walk with a friend.
Listening means welcoming the other person, acknowledging them as they see themselves, without putting ourselves in their place in order to tell them how they ought to be. It means being positively open to all their ideas, their favourite issues and their explanations.
And we should do this without interpreting or judging, leaving them time and space to find their own way forward.
Listening is not to want the other person to be like this or that; it is to learn to discover those qualities that are specific to them.
To be attentive to someone who is suffering is not to offer a solution or an explanation of their suffering, but rather to allow them to talk about it and so find their own way of freeing themselves from it.
Learning to listen to someone is the most useful exercise we can do to free ourselves from our own distress…
To listen is to offer to the other person something that we might never have discovered for ourselves: attentiveness, giving time, being a friendly presence.
It is by learning to listen to others that we reach the point of listening to ourselves, our bodies and our emotions.
It is the way of learning how to listen to the earth and to life, of becoming poets, recognising the heart and the soul of all that is.
To those who are able to listen there is given the possibility of not simply living on the surface of things; they commune with the interior pulse of every living being; they begin to discover the infinitude that inhabits the faith, the richness and the creativity of the others.
From: “Journey with Colin A doorway to the Marist Project Nazareth”