Krista Tippett: Generous Listening, Generous Questions

I highly recommend Krista Tippett's new book Becoming Wise and her interviews on On Being. There is greatly needed wisdom, generosity, integrity, consciousness, compassion, and vision held here, offering us remembrance of what we have forgotten. May we all increasingly be the peace our world yearns for. ~ Molly

At risk of stretching my analogy too far, I find myself drawn to black holes in common life -- painful, complicated, shameful things we scarcely talk about at all, alongside the arguments we replay ad nauseam, with the same polar opposites defining, winning, or losing depending on which side you're on, with predictable dead-end results. The art of starting new kinds of conversations, of creating new departure points and new outcomes in our common grappling, is not rocket science. But it does require that we nuance or retire some habits so ingrained that they feel like the only way it can be done. We've all been trained to be advocates for what we care about. This has its place and its value in civil society, but it can get in the way of the axial move of deciding to care about each other.

Listening is an every day social art, but it's an art we have neglected and must learn anew. Listening is more than being quiet while the other person speaks until you can say what you have to say. I like the language Rachel Naomi Remen uses with young doctors to describe what they should practice: "generous listening." Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability -- a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one's own best self and one's own best words and questions.

Generous listening in fact yields better questions. It's not true what they taught us in school; there is such a thing as a bad question. In American life, we trade mostly in answers - competing answers - and in questions that corner, incite, entertain. In journalism we have a love affair with the "tough" question, which is often an assumption masked as an inquiry and looking for a fight. I edited the "spiritual background of your life" question out of our produced show for years, for fear that it sounded soft, though I knew how it shaped everything that followed. My only measure of strength of a question now is in the honesty and eloquence it elicits.

If I've learned nothing else, I've learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise, or fall, to meet. So while a simple question can be precisely what's needed to drive to the heart of the matter, it's hard to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. But it's hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking a better question.

Here's another quality of generous questions, questions as social art and civic tools: they may not want answers, or not immediately. They might be raised in order to be pondered, dwelt on, instead. The intimate and civilizational questions we are living with in our time are not going to be answered with answers we can all make peace with any time soon.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who became my friend across time and space all those years ago in Berlin, spoke of holding questions, living questions:

Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything, live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday for in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I wish I could throw Elizabeth Alexander's question by the way of poetry, "Are we not of interest to each other?" into town hall meetings, the halls of Congress, and let it roll around for a while.

Our cultural mode of debating issues by way of competing certainties comes with a drive to resolution. We want others to acknowledge that our answers are right. We call the debate or get on the same page or take a vote and move on. The alternative involves a different orientation to the point of conversing in the first place: to invite searching - not on who is right and who is wrong and the arguments on every side; not on whether we can agree; but on what is at stake in human terms for us all. There is value in learning to speak together honestly and relate to each other with dignity, without rushing to common ground that would leave all the hard questions hanging.

- Krista Tippett

Excerpted from her latest book Becoming Wise:

An Inquiry Into the Mystery and Art of Living 

http://www.onbeing.org/becoming-wise 

http://www.onbeing.org/