By Haru Yamada Mathieu Phd
This spring I visited an exhibition of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher. Like many visitors, I spent my time marvelling at his impossible staircases, his worlds where birds become fish, and his visual puzzles that seem to shift the moment you think you have understood them.
There was one display that invited visitors to step inside one of his artworks. Looking through a framed opening, I took a photograph of myself taking a photograph. For a brief moment, I was no longer simply looking at Escher’s world. I had become part of it.
As I stood there, I found myself thinking about how we often think of listening as a way of gathering information. We listen to understand, to learn, to solve problems, to make decisions, and to respond. Listening helps us navigate daily life.
This kind of listening is important. In my work as a sociolinguist, I have sometimes called it Listening Fast because it is this kind of listening that helps us locate key information, connect ideas, and move efficiently through the world.
But there is another pace of listening that is at least equally important. It’s Listening Slow. Listening Slow isn’t simply slower information processing although sometimes it is confused for that. Listening Slow is a different orientation to conversation that allows someone to become interested not only in what a person is saying, but the person who is saying it. When we are Listening Slow, we are paying attention to a person’s language, emotion, uncertainty, hesitation, and silence, and also their context, including their relationship to us. When we are Listening Slow, we are not just comprehending language and emotional content, we are listening for the meaning in our connection with each other.
The Japanese language articulates these two listening speeds by way of two characters, where one form emphasises receiving information 聞く, and the other emphasises listening deeply to a person and the relationship we have with them聴く. Listening for information is written as an ear listening from outside a pair of gates, where as Listening for relationship is written as listening with the energy of fourteen hearts.
Although the Japanese-language users differentiate these two kinds of listening by way of characters and their respective meanings, English-language listeners practice these two listening speeds, too. For example, we are Listening Fast when we are waiting to #hashtag and catch the platform number to our train. We are Listening Slow when a friend is telling us they are struggling. We listen fast to gather information and we listen slow to meet another human being.
We need to listen for both information and relationship at both speeds, but modern life rewards rapid understanding. On a daily basis, we are encouraged to identify, categorise, and respond as quickly as possible. The danger is that, in our haste to understand what another person means, we sometimes lose sight of the person who is speaking.
In my journey to understand how we listen, I’m often asked what Listening Slow offers the listener. The benefits of Listening Fast are immediately apparent because we think of it as gaining valuable information, but what possibly, could Listening Slow offer a listener?
I’ve discovered along the way that Listening Slow is more than empathy and pure altruism. The real benefit of Listening Slow is that it allows you to grow, to become someone other than the version of yourself you were at the beginning of the conversation. The actor and science communicator Alan Alda once described listening as allowing yourself to be changed by another person, and I have always loved this way of thinking about listening because it points out something we often overlook. Listening involves risk. To genuinely listen is to accept the possibility that what arrives may alter us.
When a perspective doesn’t fit comfortably within our existing understanding, for a brief moment, the order we have created for ourselves becomes less certain. Unsettled, we sometimes then feel the urge to interrupt to bring order back to the momentary chaos. It’s our way of protecting ourselves from uncertainty overload. We start talking again to restor our sanity and return to what we already know.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote about this when he describes the ethical significance of encountering another person without immediately reducing them to our own categories and assumptions. I think listening asks something similar of us. Although Listening Slow is sometimes mistaken for agreement, surrender, or hesitation, what Listening Slow actually is, is the willingness to stay long enough for the other person to appear as more than our first interpretation of them.
Standing inside Escher’s artwork felt unsettling at first because I was no longer just the stable viewer looking in. Entering the artwork meant that I was no longer just an observer, but a person who had made themselves vulnerable to whatever that could happen there. Perhaps the easiest way to understand the true benefits of listening in different speeds is that whereas Listening Fast helps us gain information, Listening Slow helps us cultivate our relationships, including the one we have with ourselves, by allowing ourselves to become different from who we were when the conversation began.