Listening with our ears open. Setting our emotions/egos aside. Engaging and finding solutions.

These are lessons, I teach the 5 year olds in my class. Maybe there should be compulsory revision classes for adults….

Listening with our ears open..

The children in my class can hear. The trouble is that the majority don’t listen. It seems to me it’s not just children…..

In class, if I give them the instruction

Colour the sky blue, the sun yellow and the house red.

The moment I say the word blue, there is an instantaneous scramble to find the blue crayon. The rest of my words are lost.

It takes a long time to teach a child to listen, to wait until the words are finished, understand, think and then act. It’s an important lesson.

Setting our emotions aside.

Children react with emotion/bruised egos. When everyone involved does the same, it ends in misunderstanding, hurt, aggression. Accusations fly, resentment broods.

Engaging and finding solutions.

The children learn to engage and find solutions. Complaining about a problem is not the only way.

We all do it. I do it so many times. A topic comes up, be it racism, sexism, ageism, religion, gender equality, freedom of speech to name but a few. We listen but we don’t hear. We don’t wait, consider, understand and then act. No, we rush in, preconceived notions and emotions at the fore, ready to onslaught and attack with our opinion.

I need to listen, check my emotion, put aside my ego and engage so that I can learn, understand and consider someone else’s experiences and views in order to be part of a solution.

Case in point :

many people when they first heard the term ‘black lives matter’ — heard ‘any other life doesn’t matter.’ They listened without hearing. When actually listening, putting aside emotion and engaging, leading to understanding and learning that- it’s ‘black lives matter’ not ‘black lives are the only ones that matter.’

Parent responsibility/gender

I heard two stories about parent responsibility today. One was from a female point of view about the responsibility of her pregnancy resting solely with her. The other was from the male perspective of custody being gender biased. Both focused on a central issue — parental responsibility/gender.

We could choose to come to the discussion with our hearing ears, emotions on display, there, just to prove which one is right. Or instead we could be focusing on the issue and truly listening to understand and engage and find a solution.

The Rainbow Nation

The country, I hail from has been home to some of the most depraived, despicable human behaviour imaginable. It has also been home to some of the most noble, dignified human behaviour imaginable.

The country came to the very brink of civil war; to the very brink….

Until people listened. Really listened. They put aside their emotions and listened to understand. They engaged to find solutions. To find peace.

It’s not perfect. There is so much to learn. So much hurt and injustice. So much to say sorry for. So much to heal. So much real listening and understanding to be done. So many solutions to be found.

It’s complicated

Life is complicated. These issues are so complicated. Like Kel Campbel wrote ‘Sexism is hard to explain’. And that’s just one of the ‘isms’. We stumble on our own stupidity, hit brick walls, encounter harshness and aggression and thugs. We get scared. We get angry, so angry and we forget to listen.

It’s made even more complicated and confusing by the fact that people bring racism, sexism etc into stories that sometimes are just about human beings; who happen to be having a bad day/ are obnoxious and rude assholes who incidentally are also female/male/black/white/old/young.

Peace

There are so many enormous elephant topics that cannot be solved in a day, or even possibly in our lifetimes. Maybe applying the simple lessons, we learn as children, is just too simplistic and naive.

What I do know, is that listening with open ears (and minds), understanding, having empathy, engaging, putting ourselves in other’s shoes, respecting a different opinion and most of all, having honest, open, civil conversations will certainly make us better human beings and who knows, we could find a few solutions and a bit of peace too.

*edits made