On Truth and Listening

I am deeply, comfortably introverted. I accept (more or less) this part of my nature in all its book-loving, quiet-seeking, ardently-creative glory. For as long as I can remember, I have always asked questions so that I could listen to the answers. I didn't divulge much and I still don't tell everyone everything that is going on with me. That is a privilege that is earned. I am, however, very good at listening. 

Listening awards us so many gifts. For one, it allows us to plug directly into ideas that are not our own. It gives us perspectives that we might not have considered. It enables us to get a whole slew of ideas to form interesting patterns from. It gives us the benefit of creating "character profiles" of the people we are listening to, so that they are more colourful, more poignant and more human than any one interaction. As friends, colleagues, family, listening is to our greatest benefit. It is not only sensory (we have ears!), but supersenory - letting us form ideas that go beyond the medium of reception.

But what happens when we are confronted with ideas that we can't easily sift through to categorize and apply? What if, for some reason, we're faced with information that, at first blush, doesn't seem accurate? Perhaps it is even purposefully misleading? What if it straddles that very fine line between truth and fiction?

People who meditate often talk about the idea of detachment, whereby  a person engages with something without judgement, without wanting to pigeon-hole it into a particular ideology. Letting the idea come and go without conscious attachment. I like this idea but it doesn't always make sense in a world where we are forced to make decisions about how we feel, and how we should act. To detach from the ideas that come at us, is in some ways, a disservice to action when it is required.

How do we then, reconcile ourselves to common truths without owning every idea that comes at us? The answer to me, has always been to listen deeply. Listen to context. Listen not only to words, but how those words are applied - what are they in the service of? Have they been weaponized? Do they offer anything, and if so, what do they offer? What is the path they have taken to get to us?

As a reader, I've made it a sort of passion to play with, and learn from the works of others. I can't take it all on board because my brain would be filled to the brim. But after a long time reading someone's work, you start to see and hear the patterns that govern their lives, the part of themselves that they readily exploit, and the parts that they artfully dance right around. 

One of my favourite quotes - it is written on the inside of my work notebook - is by the glorious and effusive Anne Michaels from her first work of fiction Fugitive Pieces: Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time." 

Truth is sometimes like that. It's not always obvious, even though it's obviously there. We are absolutely mired, some days, in inflammatory rhetoric, cat photos, and for whatever reason, celebrity bottoms. But beyond the cats and bottoms, if you take one moment of sit down and digest what you know, perhaps file away the things that don't serve purpose, perhaps not shout at others who are also under the weight of their own ambiguous truthy burdens, there is a place where listening pays off.

I often work in silence. I sit on my couch, facing a large window, and the only thing I can hear is the whoosh of traffic outside, and the buzz of the refrigerator. These are the moments I take for myself to listen to myself, and to take what others are saying into account.

Not everything the world offers us is truth. Truth is found in patterns - not patterns that are coerced to fit an idea. These are naturally occurring patterns - they emerge, over time, by themselves, until they're too obvious to ignore.

But they only become obvious, if you sit. And you listen.

Some useful things to read:

Julian Treasure on 5 Ways to Listen Better

How to Be a Good Listener

Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Art of Living

On Preservation

Over the last week, I have been on a forced rest, taken down swiftly by a nasty flu virus. (If you are thinking of yelling at me about the flu shot, you can get off your soapbox because my sister has already done the honours). In a haze of lozenges, fitful naps, and bowls of soup, I have been watching a lot of informative television.

I'm not sure what the show was that I was watching yesterday (I think it might have been something about Nordic cookery), but I learned about the Global Seed Vault. If you don't know about the Global Seed Vault, it is a repository of crop seeds from almost every country in the world, stored in Svalbard. The permafrost conditions and storage facility ensure that the seeds will be kept safe in the case of manmade or natural disaster. It has the capacity to hold some 4.5 Million seed samples and currently holds about 860,000. 

In my flu-ridden, drug-infused haze, relief washed over me. I'm really glad someone is preparing for disaster.  

Human beings have always had a great capacity to both destroy and preserve, when the desire strikes. Though we don't always see destruction in a positive light, it is part of the cycle of creation. Things need to be destroyed or overtaken in order for other things to be possible.

The beauty of it all is that of course, we have the capacity to come away with knowledge so often, that can in turn inform our new creations. We are naturally prone to preserve, everything from human beings (let's ask the archaeologists) to books (thank you, librarians throughout history).

Beyond the obvious that preservation is linked to the memory of who we are and how far we've come along, there is another purpose to it and that is to hedge our bets in the face of uncertainty.

When we don't know what's coming down the pipeline, we are likely to maintain some semblance of sameness in order to keep the integrity of the things that we know best. It is in some way, a false, but noble guarantee that we are trying to give ourselves.

We sometimes try to preserve out of fear because of uncertainty. That act in itself works against us because it closes us off to how the future unknowns can actually impact, enhance or change us.

We need to be agile enough to be able to move outside of the confines of our current situation. I have always grappled with this idea. It applies to us professionally and personally. How do we move without losing our sense of purpose?

We endeavour to keep the essence of, or the most critical parts of things that represent, in the smallest piece, who we are. The world is not a vacuum and it is certainly foolhardy to think that we can keep everything and adapt to changing conditions. Things are never going to be "the way they were" because they change instantaneously and often. Instead, we keep those most crucial things that when placed into new environments, will be in their very core, similar to what we know about our past. It is about having the essence right to be able to undertake adaptation when everything around us changes.

The Global Seed Vault is exactly that idea. We know that the climate is changing. We don't know what soil conditions will be like, how much rainfall or arable land there will be, whether the chemical composition of soil will change. But we have (literally), the seed of potential.

That's enough to give anyone hope.

More reading on preservation

Mali's Librarians Saving Ancient Manuscripts from Rebel Forces

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

The Effect of Music on Dementia Patients

On Leaving Things Behind

When I was young, my family moved a lot. By the time I was 10, we had moved more than a dozen times. These journeys weren't all terribly well-planned. Sometimes we'd have a very short time to get our things together and go. I learned very quickly not to get attached to things that I wouldn't be able to take with me if the time came (and it almost inevitably did). I have one distinct memory of moving from my maternal grandmother's home. I tried as best as I could to stuff all 50 of my very thin fairy tale books into a suitcase, working my way around the nooks and crannies, wrapping clothes around them. I remember thinking that I probably wouldn't be able to do that next time around.

My frugality with things has continued throughout my life. I have always been reluctant to buy things that I didn't absolutely require. I still don't have a dining table or a blender. My bibliophilia has continued on unabated, such that when I moved into my current home, my books made up half of the boxes that were moved into the house. Though my home is filled with the things that I love, and it feels very much like a home, I always think twice about adding to the lot.

When we travel, we often make lists of things that we ought to be taking with us, to prepare for different scenarios on the trip. My own sister usually puts together entire outfits in case we have a nice dinner, or a beach day, or a trip to a museum. Lists can be extensive from various hair implements to the appropriate footwear (carry the one).

For most of my adult life, I have tried to travel as lightly as I can. It helps that most of my clothes are fashionably neutral and I don't wear much in the way of makeup, so the complexity is somewhat reduced. Still, I find myself asking the question, what can I leave behind? rather than what can I take with me?

There is a good lesson in how we conduct our lives here. In the days where minimalism happens to be in vogue, and everyone is engaged in the life-changing magic of tidying, it does us good to have an inventory of the habits, the people, the thoughts that we can leave behind. After all, just like the acid-wash jeans that served us when we were younger, some things just no longer do; after a while, they might even start to look a bit ridiculous.

We are deeply attached "what ifs" and "just in cases", all to prepare us for some inevitable future of our own mind's making.

I've found that there is an art to leaving things behind, that only comes over time, and out of habit. Though difficult to oblige, we realize that the unnecessary and seldom useful take up valuable space in our psyches. Like old clothes, or an extra pair of shoes, they hang around, claiming a territory that might well hold something more useful. Once we recognize that these eventualities may not exist, and that we are perfectly capable of making do if necessary, that space then becomes occupied by something more luxurious and more potent: potential.