Lending An
Ear
Neeman
A Sobhan
Surely,
it's not asking too much of people, is it? However, the reality
seems to be otherwise. Ask someone to lend you an ear and you'd
think you had asked him or her to lend you their earring, or
a piece of their diamond studded earlobe. All you want is five
minutes of your friend's time, so you can pour your heart out
about some small misery, having made sure that they were free
to listen to your tale of woe. Now go ahead and just try to
formulate your first sentence, and see if you can get to the
end of it without your 'listener' going slowly blue in the face
just bursting for you to finish so she can launch into HER own
SIMILAR experience to counter your story, which NATURALLY is
a hundred times more agonising than yours. Call it 'one-down-man-ship',
call it disaster-envy, but your tragedy will never get a fair
hearing among this kind of friends.
Yes, the
listening aspect of friendship in these feckless times has become
an exercise in talking past one another. Nobody listens to you
any more. Everyone wants to be the talker; no one wants to be
the listener. Still you try. So, yesterday, in spite of your
ripping headache, you had to prepare an impromptu dinner for
five extra people? “HA!” Your friend's eyes glint unsympathetically
even across the phone as she squashes the martyr in you by ignoring
your tale and instead, throwing at you with relish, the triumphant
fact that while you had a SIMPLE headache, SHE, on the other
hand, had nursed a throbbing TOOTHACHE, ALL of yesterday AND
the day before because the Dentist was not available and on
TOP of that she had to face a house full of visitors for whom
she had to prepare breakfast, lunch AND dinner. Take THAT!
Not to be
outdone and licking your wounds, you whine: “Yeah, but at least
you have a household help, mine has gone on leave.” “HA!” She
laughs bitterly, “Your maid has gone on leave; mine has taken
leave of her senses. She has gone totally mad, you tell her
to do one thing and she does another. Useless.” And you end
up hearing about her maid, her dentist, her visitors, and her
other assorted crowning miseries, perhaps, her uncooperative
husband, or dog or neighbour. In short, you have lost this round,
and yesterday's headache is threatening a comeback. You bide
your time to get a word in edgewise just to say that you really
must hang up. But she has already launched into her tirade about
her miserable old car that won't start. Actually you had a similar
problem with yours yesterday, but you bite your lips and shut
up. You are not one of 'them': You are not a bad listener, merely
a reluctant one.
In fact,
all my life, I have been too good a listener, rather, an excellent
listener and one who listens with compassion, making the right
encouraging noises. Actually, I am one of those persons everyone
unburdens to. If I'm on the verge of stepping out and the phone
rings and it happens to be one of my loquacious or complaining
friends, I never hurry them (I actually don't know how) and
always lend my ear till they drop off. Thus, it is galling when
the compliment is not returned, and instead, when it is that
rare time for me to give vent to some grievance, I find my story
instantly hijacked and flown to my would-be-listener's own destination,
deviated, detoured and far from my original port of grief.
This happens to me all the time. At first I thought that this
phenomenon occurred regarding misery. But I found that sharing
good news suffered a similar fate. Not only is my interlocutor(s)
not really impressed, I have to end up listening to how they
have either already been there, done that; possessed it, been
possessed by it; had a better deal, a larger package, longer
duration, shinier version; and in conclusion, (which takes another
ten minutes to become conclusively conclusive) been more fortunate,
and more often than I.
Makes me
wonder. Do I have the wrong kind of friends? Where can I trade
this lot in and get a fresh batch with certain desirable specifications,
for example, that they should be suffering from massive cases
of laryngitis, chronic lethargy that stops them from jumping
into your story, and some kind of mental disorder that makes
them smile at your happy anecdotes while making clicking noises
with their tongue at your tragic tales without these triggering
off similar and better (or worse) incidents from their own lives.
Seriously,
can't the art of listening, that is, listening with awareness,
sensitivity, compassion and non-judgmental objectivity, be learned
or taught? Or is the art of listening simply a natural gift,
or rather a curse that some unfortunate individuals like me
just happen to possess, which the rest of the world takes advantage
of? You nod intelligently and lean forward to catch every nuance
and detail of the world's one-sided conversation, and then when
it's your turn to talk, the same world turns glazed eyes and
deaf ears to you, only half-listening and blithely interrupting
your story and turning it to rubble under the crushing wheels
of its chatter, undermining your unshared experiences and diminishing
you.
Or have
you ever tried to disagree with someone about a book or film,
or dissent from the general opinion about the accepted spin
on a discussed topic? See if you can take a breath before you
even attempt to phrase your arguments before the tidal wave
of opposing views will carry away your demurring words as if
it were a fisherman's hut in Hatiya.
Come, are
there no gentle souls out there, willing to un-wax their ears
and apply duct-tape to their lips for the duration of five minutes
while they hear me out as I enthusiastically tell them about,
say, my weekend of doing a life-enhancing course called The
Art of Living? “HA!” Says my 'friend', “If you really want a
course that would change your life, let me tell you about the
fantastic one on Feng Shui that I took last year….”
With friends
like these who needs…….a column? I do. Thank God, my space doesn't
talk back. HA! I can say, before anyone else can interrupt my
flow. HA! Whoever thinks that the Feng Shui or Sheng Fui or
Shiatsu course was great, let me tell you about the Art of Living
Course I just did. And I shall do so next week, right here in
this mute column space, without interruptions, and without glazed
eyes and deaf ears. Well, whichever organs of perception people
bring to their reading, surely, glazed eyes is not one of them,
and surely, it is not too much to ask people to lend you their….
figurative ears?