The uncommon hospitality of listening

There is a point in the movie Patch Adams where Patch and Carin are talking about Patch's epiphany on how medicine should work. Carin expresses her distrust in Patch’s positive outlook on medicine, because people hurt people. Patch’s response always gets me, he asks her “and who hurt you?”. In most of our society this conversation would not have ended that way. It would have been arguments over the view of humans – if they are generally good or not. But Patch listens to what Carin is saying and is able to hear her pain between the words and respond to what is being said. We live in a world that is geared to make noise and to be heard, but is quickly losing the skill of listening.

"Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends. Velocity of speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones. The same dynamics apply in groups, where research shows that the voluble are considered smarter than the reticent - even though there's zero correlation between the gift of gab and good ideas."¹

This tendency to favor the talkative is exacerbated when you consider how many of us listen only long enough to start the process of thinking what we are going to say next or how this is going to play on social media or should we take a picture or a video or ... or ... or ... ad infinitum.

Our brains are structured in such a way as to allow us to both listen and process a response simultaneously. When listening to music, for example, our brains hear the music while processing the response of us tapping our toes in rhythm with the music (note this means your brain is actually parsing the music in real time to find the beat) and in many cases we are having an emotional response to the music as well.² This ability to multi-task should allow us to listen and process a verbal response at the same time, but it seems that most of us have not trained ourselves to actively listen while formulating a response.

The under-training of our listening skills has made it so that when a person takes the time to truly listen it is a gift given to the speaker. Hospitality is the act of making space for the other and in this regard taking the time to actively listen is in fact an act of hospitality.

The extroverted ideal³ leads us to believe that we must respond quickly or we will seem unintelligent or worse yet detached from the conversation. The hospitality of listening means that we take the time to fully understand what is being said and only then process the appropriate response, which may actually be non-verbal.

Hospitality is inevitably an intimate practice. Whether we are letting people into our homes or feeding the homeless or giving aid to the infirmed we are providing a space in our lives to allow the other to find ontological value. In the moment of hospitality we are intimately connected to the person we are providing space to exist. In actively listening we are allowing the fullness of that person’s ideas to exist without interruption and we are intimately connected to them in that moment.

On several occasions I friends have asked why I, an incredibly shy guy, like to preach. More often than not I respond joking that it is the only time I get to talk for twenty minutes without being interrupted. As much as I am joking in my response, it is funny only because it is true. Though if I am honest, I am pretty terrible at active listening myself. So much of my self understanding is tied up in how I respond to people that all too often I do not listen as actively as I should. Active listening is definitely a skill that I am learning, one that I think will be worth the work.