Imagine a world where showing up for others is the best way of showing up for yourself. That’s the human listening world at its best, when noise becomes sound and sound becomes the language we use to understand and appreciate the world around us. Listening is a powerful form of human intelligence, a primary form of soft learning we use to connect another person’s reality with our own.
As a sociolinguist growing up in different countries, I’ve been fascinated with the way people navigate their everyday language systems to construct dramatically different worlds. For me, language know-how is like knowing how to crack the code to a cultural vault – it’s as alluring as it is mesmerising. It’s how, spellbound at the back of a public bus on my way to my first day in a Tokyo primary school after three years in New York, I missed my stop. My auditory system must have been working hard to translate the mechanical vibrations into electrical impulses for my auditory cortex to hear the announcement of my bus stop, but because I wasn’t listening, I got off at the wrong one, and I was lost.
Listening requires our full attention, and switching it on means we can gain the information we need not only to successfully get to our destinations, but also to help us learn about the people we meet along the way, like the kind man in the suit who gave me a ten-yen coin to call home so I could get to school that day. Listening begins the moment you identify that the sounds just delivered to your auditory cortex are those of a human voice trying to connect to you, and continues and ends with your decision to keep on listening – or not.
When we decide to stay in conversations, we can listen to what linguists call the ‘surface level’ of explicit language, but we can also listen for the ‘deep structure’ that sounds out personal, relational and cultural meanings, too. We experience both kinds of listening over our lifetimes, but sometimes in the haste of our everyday lives, we miss the latter, like I used to before I had time to think about the significance of this kind of listening, many years after the missed bus stop in Tokyo. In an ICU in a London hospital with a dislocated jaw, ruptured ear drum, and a punctured lung, on nine drips and a ventilator clapped onto my throat, I began the month-long process of relearning how to breathe but also listen, using a particular kind of listening the Japanese write as, 聴く‘kiku’.
Kiku 聴くis a tiny treasure of a listening word brought over from China to Japan in the fourth century by Empress Suiko’s emissaries. Comprised of the smaller characters of an ear 耳on the left and fourteen 十四 hearts 心 on the right, 聴くkiku conjures a person listening with the energy of fourteen hearts, and contrasts with another channel of listening, also pronounced ‘kiku’ but written as as 聞く, with an ear in between a pair of gates that imagines a person leaning in to listen for informational content from the outside. At the ICU, where the medical staff repeatedly told me that in order to check out, I needed to be able to breathe on my own, I discovered that you need surface-level listening to understand the informational prognosis for going forward but deep listening to accelerate and optimize fully getting better.
In pre-internet days, you could fly to Tokyo from New York and watch the same news cast one way in English and another in Japanese. I’d experience this perspectival seesaw that was at once exciting and unnerving at most once a year and only after having filled myself with a day of visiting old friends and haunts. But in our digital worlds today, we are asked to consume multiple accounts of realities across a vast number of people at mind-numbing speed, making listening today more important than ever.
Listening gives us the capacity to combine the well-being depth of intimate conversation, and the well-doing breadth that sources the many channels we use as we listen across cultures, social groups and generations. In a nationwide poll of 1,112 US women by the Associated Press and a petcare company, one third of the women surveyed said their partners were worse listeners than their pets, with some who could cite back verbatim what their partners just said and still not make them feel heard. Good listening is knowing the difference between tuning in to listen for information and tuning in to listen to a person. Noticing the difference between what we’re hearing and who is saying it means we can adjust our settings so that ultimately, we can show up for others but also ourselves.
