Who Are You Talking To?

When I finished my Bachelor’s Degree in music, I spent three years teaching general music at a middle school. It was a lot of fun for me, partly because there was no curriculum at all: I could teach whatever I wanted.

With my seventh graders, I would bring in musical instruments, show them how they worked, and let some volunteers try to play them. Most of my kids were pretty happy with that - but certainly not all of them.

I remember one boy who never stopped disrupting the class. From bell to bell, he talked incessantly. He blurted out, he interrupted everything, he criticized and he made the gears grind for the entire hour. And he was always upset.

One day when I tried to carry on, he called out angrily: “Why don’t you listen to me?” In all honesty, I don’t remember my immediate response. What I remember was my mind gasping in shock, at this thirteen-year-old boy who had never taken a breath in my presence without saying something, and diverting all the class’s attention from the moment he walked in through the door - now complaining that I wasn’t giving him enough attention. But as soon as his words reached me, I felt another presence in the room. This boy was not talking to me. He was talking to his father. I had this visceral feeling that it was his father who didn’t pay attention to him. And it seemed that he was so used to being ignored at home, that he came to interpret every situation as more of the same.

At that moment, I felt sympathy for him. But I also felt helpless - because this wasn’t even about me. I wasn’t his father… so what could I do? How could I fill a hole that I had not created myself, and in fact had very little control over?

I tried to speak with him after one of our lessons, but he was astonishingly impermeable. I believe to this day that he wasn’t listening - or talking - to me at all. His mind was on his deeper pain.

Pain does work like that: Our deeper pains - ones that tend to start early, and close to home - eventually come to taint our entire lives, even when we are in a different place and with different people. This happens because we get so used to the pain that it becomes a part of us, until we don’t even notice it anymore. But it is there, commanding our conversations in ways that we cannot even believe. Someone else might notice that we are acting strange - because they did not grow up in the same household, and they do not know our pain, and our way of acting makes no sense to them. But in the meantime, we will be walking around with this pain, that is looking for an outlet, and every little thing that reminds us of it will cause us to react accordingly. And if our pain is great - which it usually is - then every little thing will act as a reminder. Every man will be a reminder of our father, every woman a reminder of our mother, and so on. In the end, the world becomes our punching bag, though most of whom we meet has nothing to do with the root cause, the deeper pain that we are feeling.

In my own life, after one particularly hard breakup, I found that I was a lot more interested in the news. I would allude to it regularly, and speak my frustration about what was happening in the world. I had suddenly become “politically active”, or at least a lot more so than before. But at some point along the line, it suddenly hit me that there was a genuine pattern behind my preoccupation with the news: It always came up the moment I thought about my X. And needless to say, with that failed romantic relationship locked in my mind, there was very little chance that I could feel good about the news - or even see them clearly. I would actually seek out the harder stories just so I could vent. My mind was on its deeper pain, and just looking for a punching bag.

Any conversation that we have these days is not going to be very productive if we cannot listen to each other - I’m sure this is widely accepted. But I say that if we want to listen, we need to be more quiet with our own voice; we need to calm our own minds if we want to be receptive.

Would you like to go on a real treasure hunt?

What upsets you these days?

How, exactly, does it make you feel? Find some key words. How about: 

Distraught

Helpless

Sad

Angry

Small

Or maybe something different, for example: Like a hero?

These words are important, so take some time to explore. It’s good to be specific with your words - as specific as possible.

It is possible to trace these emotions deep into their source, so that they may remind you of something that happened to you before - something that made you feel exactly the same way: Distraught, helpless, sad, angry, or like a hero, or whatever your emotions are. Some people even reach a point in their lives where they feel this emotion all the time, so much has it permeated their existence. Some older people even have a facial expression that is frozen in one place, showing how they feel about life - all the time.

If you can turn the light on in that dark room of your soul, you are on your way to becoming a true peacemaker. But it’s a journey, and it will be your choice whether to continue, every step of the way. If you have found the source of your pain, the next step will be to learn about it, and eventually to heal it. If you can do that, then you will truly be ready to listen - to someone else’s story. You will then truly be a good listener.

I do wish, for the boy in my class, that he did - or will someday - come to terms with his father. God knows that if he does, he may truly hear another person’s voice for the first time in his life. And I say this with hope. I think that this would be amazing for him, and for me, and for all of us.

Photo by Towfiqu Barbhuiya, Pexels.com