Help me! Help me! No one listens to me?

The incommunicability is the most terrible of solitudes (F. Nietzche)

The biggest problem these days is that people have taken a lot of bad habits and lost as many good ones.

The bad ones are there for all to see and it is useless to list them, but we can identify the good ones, first of all, the gift of “listening”.

People no longer listen, they are no longer capable of listening. Listening to what the other has to say to us is the ability to meet, to overcome barriers and obstacles that have now shattered humanity. By now, listening without interrupting has become an exclusive of the priests in the confessionals. We prefer to be always protagonists, we often interrupt the interlocutor because we are saddened by the desire to say our opinion, and those times that civil education prevails, we wait only for the other to end up being able to finally express ourselves.

We have forgotten that, in a dialogue, the most important factor is not to say ours, we already know that, but to listen to the point of view of the other because it could have much to teach us.

Instead, we quarrel, scream, scream louder than those who scream, as if screaming was equivalent to being right. Reason for what, then? Igor Sibaldi, an Italian philosopher and philologist, always states that “in life either you are right or you are happy”.

When you see two people talking, it often happens that, once one has finished, the other responds vaguely and changes the subject, as if he had not listened to anything, and in fact that’s exactly what happened.

This happens everywhere, between partners, between parents and children, between work colleagues, between friends.

Everyone hears but no longer listens, and if they do it is only for very brief moments. Perhaps they are immersed in their thoughts, the fact is that in a dialogue only the ears work and not the brain.

“In the beginning was the Word”…these are the words with which the Gospel of John begins. “Finally no one listened to him anymore” he would have added if he had lived in today’s times.

The use of the word is now immoderate and used disproportionately, you open your mouth just to talk, to show off, often without being aware of what you say. The world is full of speakers, but there is a great lack of listeners, because nobody does it anymore.

The disaster of this society is precisely the fact that there are too many words for a few minds / ears and so there can be no communication. Why do we interrupt the other to say ours if the other does not listen and does the same thing with us? Doesn’t that seem like a dialogue between fools?

Could this be the cause of the planetary failure of the relationship? Or the disastrous relationship between parents and children today? Maybe it’s not the only one but I think it’s among the first.

The ego of each of us is completely blind and deaf, refuses to listen for fear that the soul may awaken and find something true in the statements of those who are in front of us and so change. Change is always the enemy number 1 for the ego, change means evolving and the ego does not want to take this risk.

It is paradoxical that in an age of global communication we no longer listen.

Everyone is convinced that they have an answer to everything, they stiffen their convictions (which are never really theirs) and they are not interested in knowing other points of view or taking into account other information.

That’s why they don’t listen. They are convinced that they are holders of “reason” and if what the other says is in contrast with his beliefs then it counts for nothing.

The result of all this? Incommunicability. You talk, I don’t listen, then I talk but you don’t listen. What we call dialogue is actually the sum of two parallel monologues that, like the rails of a train, will never meet.

Let’s try to reverse this trend, let’s learn to listen even to those who don’t seem to have anything interesting to say; in the worst case scenario we will remain with our knowledge and opinions unchanged, a result that, moreover, is what always happens today. But we could also receive new sensations and information, that push us to reflect and maybe change, because the others are our mirror and, if someone speaks to us, probably the Universe has something important to tell us, so let’s listen to it.

Resuming the habit of “listening” to others is one of the pillars of all the disciplines present in the Ark lab, because without real listening there can be no learning…

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