Listen Up

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”

. . . Jimi Hendrix.

Back in the nineteen eighties, I volunteered at Chris Brownlie AIDS hospice where there were 26 beds and 26 dying men. This was before the life-saving cocktails when having HIV meant there wasn’t much time left. I went from room to room to sit with each resident and see what he needed and wanted during his last days. A hand to hold? Something particular to eat? An opportunity to vent?

There was a man in particular whom I was very fond of. There were notes in the volunteer lounge on each resident and I checked his records before I went to his room. He had bone cancer and AIDS. His condition was so dire, I didn’t know what I could possibly say to him.

When I arrived at his room, the door was open. He was awake and I lightly knocked. “Hello,” I said, “May I come in?”

“Yes. Please do,” he said.

I sat in the chair beside his bed and I didn’t say anything. I just listened. “Too many volunteers just barge right into my room without asking permission,” he said. “They walk in like I’m not a person and they talk their heads off and tell me what to do. I like to smoke a cigarette once in a while and yesterday, a volunteer scolded me about how dangerous it was and how I needed to stop. I sent him away. I don’t have very long in this world and I don’t intend to spend my last days in deprivation. There’s nothing anyone can say or do that will fix or change my situation. All I want is for someone to listen to me. To really hear me. To respect my space, both physically and emotionally.”

He asked me to hand him a cigarette and I did. I lit it for him and I saw peacefulness come over him. I had spent the requisite time being schooled in how to act when I was in the hospice but this was Volunteer Training 101. When I left this man’s room, I had said very little and I had gained a vast amount of wisdom that I could use in the hospice and in my life.

I carried on with my volunteer work and I continued to sit and listen. “Is there something I can do for you or get for you?” That was one of the few questions I asked. One man said that he needed to make sure someone was holding his hand when he died. The other volunteers and I took shifts and gave him what he wanted. Another man wanted to take a shower every day and a male volunteer helped him do that.

During my time there, I sat with a man in his thirties who wanted to talk about his career in the opera. He related to me since I had been in the ballet and I spent a long time hearing his experiences. He was fascinating. One day he told me that he loved peanuts. I bought a large bag of them and I was looking forward to giving them to him, but when I arrived at his room the next day, the bed was empty. He had died in the night. I went into the lounge and left the bag of peanuts there. I was terribly upset. but I was also happy that I had spent so much time listening to the things he had wanted to say. The things he had wanted someone to hear.

When we have a difficult or confusing choice to make, we often want to run it by someone but we don’t necessarily want them to tell us what to do. We don’t want them to problem solve for us. We want them to listen and become a sounding board that will shed light on our situation so we can decide what would be best for us. If someone barges in with an unsolicited opinion like the volunteer who scolded the resident for smoking, it will only cause us to become defensive and resentful.

It’s comforting when someone really listens to you. You feel satisfied, supported and understood. It’s off putting when someone is so busy figuring out the next thing they want to say, you feel unheard and ignored. It feels like they don’t care what you’re saying so why bother? I make it a habit to stay quiet and refrain from giving my opinion unless someone asks for it. Even then, I have no attachment to whether or not they do what I suggest. My hospice days taught me that allowing people their dignity, no matter what I think about their choices, is the greatest gift we can offer. When we just listen and withhold judgment, we have the opportunity to understand the other person and see that we are all connected.

Listening is not a skill we were born with. Like so many other things, the Buddhist philosophy calls it a profound spiritual practice rooted in compassion and mindfulness. When someone opens up about an issue they are contemplating, we may think we have a solution but it isn’t their solution. What we would do isn’t what they would do. We each have our own karma and our own lessons to learn. When we refrain from telling someone what we think they should do, that’s what being a friend means. It’s about honoring their process and encouraging them to listen to their own body and their own messages.

Winston Churchill said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”