Happy Friday, folks ;)
My dad gave me a strange piece of advice once: “Listen to what others tell you. When they criticize you, consider them savants, and listen carefully. Nobody is listening deeply enough to you anyway, so might as well listen to them!”
To young me, this sounded like nonsense at best, a recipe for disaster at worst. Yet, I had a feeling when Appa (what we call our dads in Tamil) said this that he was onto something the rest of us might take a lifetime to figure out.
Context: My dad is a badass. He lived through a civil war in Sri Lanka, working during the day and studying through the night by candlelight to singlehandedly bring his 8 brothers out of poverty.
Such a level of resilience is one thing, but what’s more badass is this: My dad is someone who listens the most, and cares the least for others’ opinions as relevant to his identity, out of most people I know.
This showed in how we were raised. Amma and Appa would often push my brother and me, admittedly sometimes out of parental anxiety, but I not once felt judged by them. I can’t remember one instance where my parents compared me to anyone to motivate or demean me. So why, then, would my dad suggest listening to the noise and judgments of the world when navigating it?
Appa’s odd advice makes a bit more sense when I revisit it with 3 underlying truths.
Nobody’s really listening to us. Everyone is listening to their own narrative at the end of the day. In their eyes, our choices and existence might mean something completely different in context of their own desires, fears and assumptions. In the same way, their criticisms of us likely reflect their own narratives about themselves, more than anything else.
If criticism is just everyone speaking their own narratives, listening to others is a way for us to better understand the world’s stories. When we realize that any criticism of us actually has nothing to do with our core identity, we can meaningfully decide how to integrate it into our narrative. When paired with a solid understanding of our own intuitions, we can find ways to acknowledge stories that are different from ours, and learn how to integrate them into our lives in ways that brings colour, depth and perspective to our intuitions. Others don’t have to be “right” in our eyes for their opinions to be helpful — they can always offer perspective that we may not have considered. This way, we get to reframe what being “right” even means. This opens us up to grace, patience, and openness in light of contrasting stories. This is something I struggle with, but have been working on.
The kicker: To listen to others compassionately and productively, we can’t simply be open; we need to first and foremost be willing to trust ourselves. What are our intuitions? Are we comfortable enough with ourselves to cultivate silence in our minds, so that we can leave space for our intuitions to voice themselves? We can’t really meaningfully integrate other views into our own, and know what to leave in the trash, until we learn to get comfortable with ourselves. The more comfortable we are with ourselves, the more of our narrative we learn to sit with, and the less of it we need to use to defend ourselves. This also leaves more space for meaningful listening. I think this is what Appa does best, and it’s a beautiful example to watch.
[A suggestion for better listening to ourselves and our world: meditation. While I’m pretty confident in my gut, meditation is something my ego and overactive thoughts struggle with. Silencing my mind? Good luck.
Yet, I’m motivated to meditate when I think of it less as a silencer and more as a tool to better hear myself and others. Digging past our inner chatter gives us space to develop a muscle for awakening our deeper intuitions. It’s a habit Appa swears by, and I finally am beginning to understand why.]
This week, what will you do to cultivate stillness within, so you can better hear yourself and others?
Love, always,
Raha