I Speak, Therefore I Am.
I Listen, Therefore, You Are
Are You My Listener? is a children’s book for adults…and perhaps for children as well. I first wrote the story in 2002 for my then infant daughter and have used it over the years with students and clients as a starting point for what would usually become a years-long exploration with them on the single most sacred and yet misunderstood aspect of human experience: Listening.
The Future is Listening is a “project” I began before I even had a professional practice or students. In fact, it started when I was myself an Undergrad student. The space of Listening I reference in Are You My Listener? – and that has informed my work over all these years – first emerged for me as a conscious phenomena not through direct interaction with another human, but with their writing. Specifically, Robert Pirsig and James Carse. I read both Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintainance and Finite and Infinite Games within weeks of each other and they (along with the Tao Tse Ching, which I also read in those weeks) caused my life, and whatever habituation I had accumulated to that point, to…stop.
Or at least pause for an extended period.
It was as if what I had read had taken hold of a loose thread in my sense of “reality” and pulled in such a way as to remove all of the seams that held together the various beliefs and ideas and certainties and should and musts that made up my sense of what life was – and what and who I was. It wasn’t that what I had read challenged my beliefs or ideas and left me lost or confused. It was that what I read invited me to just…let go.
For a few weeks, I missed most classes. I didn’t really see friends much. The TV might be on at night but, I wasn’t taking any of it in. I was simply…here. Eating, sleeping, walking – just sort of on the planet and living day-to-day life without any sense of needing to really do anything. It was neither traumatic nor dramatic and most folks didn’t really notice that something had shifted for me (in the world before cell phones and internet, if you didn’t answer your land line, it could take a while for folks to get in touch with you even if they did notice a shift!).
During this time I could, for the first time in my life, actually hear myself. Not my mind, my ideas or emotions – but me, my Self. All of those words from Carse and Pirsig (and Lao Tse) weren’t words in the sense that they had things to say to me. They were some kind of congealed silence, some form of Speaking that was actually a supremely deep Listening. I wouldn’t have used these words at the time but that was the experience that stopped my life: these books I had stumbled onto weren’t trying to tell me anything but were instead listening to me, and listening to a part of me that I wasn’t even aware had been trying to Speak. I’m aware of how odd that might sound and yet, that was the experience.
And that’s when my adult life began. When I began to explore what it was to have deep listening for Self – what invited it, what allowed for it, what blocked it. And eventually, as I moved into professional practice, what it was to design spaces that would invite and allow for others to hear themselves. Even and especially in contexts – classrooms and client offices – where it might seem that my job was to Speak in a compelling enough way that others would internalize what I had said.
To speak in a way that was a form of Listening became for many many years, and is to this day, a craft that I was at work on developing in myself – and in others who shared a commitment to the development of human beings as human beings. Which is a very separate body of work from the development of a human being as a doctor, or a computer scientist, or a good citizen, or any other profession or pre-defined state of being. The later is critical to the sustainability of a society, but it does not ensure the flourishing of a unique, individual human life – and, too often, actually suppresses that flourishing.
This little book, Are You My Listener?, contains a simple story I developed a very long time ago as a way to start the conversation with students and clients and peers. For reasons having mainly to do with the non-profit I launched a few years ago, I put the story into physical form in 2022/2023 – and added an extended essay at the back of the book on the relationship of Listening and our experience of “God”. I hope you find it of value and, if it matters to you, know that this is not a ‘business’ for me and I’ll make no profit on the book (I suppose if we somehow sell an unexpectedly high number of copies there might eventually be some profit but, in the very unlikely case that happens, whatever profit there is will go to the nonprofit and its work of developing a generation of humane technologists).