Until a few years ago, I thought I knew what it meant to be a good listener. It meant being quick to hear and slow to speak. It meant having a calm demeanor, a warm smile and a steady shoulder on which a friend could cry. It meant commitment and trust. It meant sacrifice. It meant love.
But at times, it also meant constructing an illusory understanding of what I thought was going on inside someone’s mind. I remember being this kind of listener during my second year at Duke. A friend and I were sharing a conversation about how each of us thought about gender as a formative agent in our identity. Being male, I had been conditioned since childhood to estrange myself from such dialogue as if the word “gender” somehow connoted in my mind, “not relevant to men.” As a woman, however, my friend experienced daily life quite differently than I did.
She described to me how regularly she thought of herself first as a woman and then as a human being. She admitted that when constructing an image in her head of a physician or engineer, the person was always a man, even though she herself had considered pursuing these careers. She related in detail the many safety precautions she took when walking home and how even that wasn’t enough to displace the lurking fear of what could happen on any given night.
As our conversation went on, I found myself anticipating what she was trying to say. When she struggled at times to capture the complexity of her story with words, I intruded her narrative with suggestions, hoping to fill in the gaps with presumptive comments such as, “I think you meant to say this…” or “You must have been feeling this way….” I thought I was being a good listener — someone who understood her situation and could offer guidance on how to reconcile her feelings.
The problem was that I didn’t understand her situation; in fact, I could never fully understand. Quite the opposite: by claiming to comprehend what I didn’t know, I was neglecting the multiplicity of her personhood. There are some experiences that simply cannot be conveyed in their entirety, lest they be fundamentally reduced. It’s like describing the color blue to someone who’s never seen it before. Some philosophers refer to these ineffable phenomena as qualia. As for me, I’m trying to think of what these unique experiences could potentially teach us about emotional humility, about what it truly means to listen.
Within Duke’s campus, we are surrounded by the pervasive rhetoric of “listening.” Especially in conversations regarding racial, gender or class reconciliation, we are urged strongly to listen and consider deeply the personal experiences of our peers. Upon concluding these dialogues, however, I often find myself bewildered by that word. What is listening, and if we were to partake in it, would it be enough to mend our broken world?
After immersing myself in various narratives on campus for three years, I’m learning that listening was never meant to serve as a solution to our problems. It wasn’t intended to be a panacea for all the hurt we inflict upon each other. It alone cannot bring about change in society. But what listening can do is provide channels of profound emotional connection between people. It ensures that, before we try to understand and help a friend in need, we take active steps to diminish our own voice so that their story is expressed on their terms, not on our own presuppositions.
As Duke students, we’re surrounded by discourses assuring us that we will one day change the world. We’re told that our intelligence and ambition will help us discover novel solutions to global issues. Within this kind of environment, we start to nurture unbridled confidence in our ability to solve human issues with the same efficiency with which we would ace a problem set. But in doing so, we could easily fall into the trap of fetishizing the chase for a solution. By consequence, the humanity of a person sharing their story loses its importance in our minds as the obsession with finding an answer seizes primary control of our interest.
When we engage in this kind of listening — the kind that gives ear to a friend’s experience only to figure out how to provide a solution — we are concerned inherently with ourselves. As I listened to my friend explain her experience of living as a woman in today’s society, I was concerned more about understanding the contents of her mind than about paying attention to the way she was expressing her feelings. I tried to finish her sentences and articulate her pain before she shared it with me on her own terms — just to let her know I understood. What I didn’t realize was that by trying to get into her head, I had totally missed her heart.
I didn’t know it then, but I was listening as if it were a means to an end. It led me to believe I understood what my friend was going through when in fact I had neglected her. Nowadays, I see listening more as a manifestation of emotional humility. It’s not in anyone’s power to provide answers to people who disclose their hardships. Rather, by carefully attending to the words of others, we let them know that it is their personhood and not their thought that is important to us.
For this reason, we should take care not only to listen intentionally but also to choose our own words carefully. Our speech comprises more than just its denoted linguistic meaning. When we take the time to search for the right word to express our feelings, we also communicate a subtle sensitivity and emotion into our dialogue. So I hope that in all our conversations, both speaker and listener will try to listen genuinely for the heart that lies beneath the thoughts we share.
Chris Lee is a Trinity senior. His columns run on alternate Thursdays.
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