Showing Up

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

Mary Oliver, poet

A famous (now infamous) comedian once joked that 80% of life is showing up.

There’s more than a little truth in that.  Showing up, being physically present, is all that is required of us much of the time.  Unfortunately, I haven’t even been able to manage to do that – this post is a week and a half late!  Why is it late? The short answer is that I was on vacation in Florida.  The longer answer is a bit more complicated.  In the end, I wasn’t able to sit down and write a post that I was happy with.  Not that I didn’t try, but nothing I wrote rang true.  I could have posted something, but that would have been the equivalent of just showing up.  And showing up just isn’t good enough anymore. 

I think that’s why our country is facing so many problems right now.  For too long we as a society have just shown up.  We are physically present when we have to be, but we are not emotionally present to one another.  We don’t take the time to try and understand opposing views.  As a result, fruitful communication has broken down.  While we may hear the words that are being said, we don’t listen for the meaning behind those words.

I was doing some homework on listening recently and ran across some interesting statistics.  Nearly half of our waking hours are spent listening, but we are distracted about 75% of the time.  That means we hear, but don’t really listen, at least three-fourths of the time.  Compounding the problem is that we only remember about 50% of what we hear, and that drops to a meager 20% after a few hours. 

There’s also that little problem of hearing what we want to hear.  At times it can be a good thing.  I can’t tell you how many times someone has come up to me after a funeral and thanked me for something I said in my sermon.  The thing is, I never said it.  But, they heard what they needed to hear at that moment.

Sometimes hearing what we want to hear isn’t so benign.  I have also been criticized for saying things I never said in sermons.  People make certain assumptions about you and your views and those assumptions color how they listen and what they hear.  It happens to all of us.  “That’s not what I said,” and “That’s not what I meant,” have to be two of the most common phrases in the English language.  It’s no wonder that there is so much misunderstanding.  And don’t even let me get started on politics.

I’m convinced that many of our problems could be avoided if we listened, I mean really listened, to one another.  It’s not enough to just show up, to be physically present and mentally elsewhere when someone is speaking.  We need to be fully present to them, physically and emotionally.

How do you feel when someone listens with complete attention to you?  Don’t you feel as if what you have to say matters?  Don’t you feel validated in some way?  Even if you and the other person ultimately disagree, don’t you feel respected when someone listens intently?

What it comes down to, ultimately, is love.  We are called to love one another.  One of the best ways we can demonstrate that love is by listening, not just hearing.

As I write this there is tremendous social unrest in the country.  This is not a political blog, so I’m not going to make any political comments, but you have to wonder how many of our current problems could have been avoided if someone had listened, I mean really listened, to what was being said and responded in love.

Listening isn’t always easy; we live in a face paced world and are so easily distracted.  One of my least favorite words is “multitasking.”  I know people who are very proud of their ability to multitask.  Hmmm.  What multitasking means to me is giving partial attention to several things at once and doing none of them very well.  We often “multitask” when we’re in conversation – checking our phone, surfing the internet or watching TV.  What message are we sending to one another?

It takes a lot less effort to just show up than it does being a good listener and an active, caring presence in someone’s life.  It’s also a lot less rewarding.  Try being an attentive listener this week.  Try giving someone your full attention and see what happens.  You might change the world one conversation at a time.

God bless. Pay attention and wear your dang mask.