Sound gloomy? Fatalistic? It’s not! Here’s how it works.
If you’ve ever been with someone who was soon to die, you will remember how passionately you listened, how attentively you sought to move in the fleeting moment, how you treasured their every word. You were mindful of their impermanence, compassion had finally gained the upper hand in your heart, and you knew you couldn’t change things. Since you couldn’t change anything, you accepted the situation as it was. And since the moment was fleeting, you pressed your mind around the event, almost as though you were trying to “memorize” it, to save it, receiving every ounce of their being.
That’s how being unable to change things makes you a better listener.
I have an unfair advantage regarding this topic, because I’m a hospice volunteer. Families with a dying person at their center have been teaching me how to sit with the most difficult teacher of all. I am not acquiring this skill quickly: I persist in trying to fix things. I try to talk people out of their fear, cheer people out of their grief.
Occasionally, my efforts wear out. I cave in, and let the grief and loss and terror just have its way. I am Answerless, I show up anyway, and always find that no one really expects "answers" at all, so being answerless is nothing to hide; if I just let the sorrow or hurt or loss roll through me, the people are somehow comforted.
It was never them I wanted to fix at all. It was me. (Thank you, Joe Hart.)
It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.
Dick Cavett
Cavett
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
