Ears to Hear

Sometimes I’m foolish enough to believe that my ears are located on the sides of my head.

You know them: the little dangly, fleshy bits that look like they’ve been moulded by a three-year-old playing with modelling clay that has dried before anybody could put the finishing touches on it.

Goofy looking on the outside - especially given that they just keep on growing after everything else starts to shrink - ears are well designed to collect and funnel sound down through the auditory canal, and through the tympanic membrane, or eardrum. From there things get a little nutty. According to Wikipedia:

“That sound pressure is amplified through the middle portion of the ear and, in land animals, passed from the medium of air into a liquid medium. The change from air to liquid occurs because air surrounds the head and is contained in the ear canal and middle ear, but not in the inner ear. The inner ear is hollow, embedded in the temporal bone, the densest bone of the body. The hollow channels of the inner ear are filled with liquid, and contain a sensory epithelium that is studded with hair cells. The microscopic "hairs" of these cells are structural protein filaments that project out into the fluid. The hair cells are mechanoreceptors that release a chemical neurotransmitter when stimulated. Sound waves moving through fluid push the filaments; if the filaments bend over enough it causes the hair cells to fire. In this way sound waves are transformed into nerve impulses. The nerve impulses travel from the left and right ears through the eighth cranial nerve to both sides of the brain stem and up to the portion of the cerebral cortex dedicated to sound. This auditory part of the cerebral cortex is in the temporal lobe.”

If that alone doesn’t make you marvel at the complexity and downright unlikelihood of life and the sheer improbability of living creatures, then I don’t know what will.

But that’s just the start of it. That’s the part of our anatomy that lets us listen to a beautiful piece of music, or hear the sound of water cascading over stones. That’s the mechanical part.

Once that sound is in the cerebral cortex, it becomes subject not only to the temporal lobe’s functionality, but also places like the amydgala, which among other things, plays a role in creating emotions, and our old friend the hippocampus, which is principally involved in the creation and storage of memories.

The sounds come in, but what we do with them once they are rattling around in the maze of neurons that compose our brains is another matter all together. And so while we technically hear with our ears, we listen with our brains, and what we hear is filtered through the web of emotions and memories that we tote around with us.

I realized the other night that so often when I am hearing those people most important to me speak, I am not really listening. Nothing new there; hearing but not listening is one of the most common of human afflictions. My midnight epiphany was that I so often was listening with my fear – that complex marriage of emotion and memory -- and sound when filtered through that morass is perceptively altered. Worse than simply blocking sound out, listening through the cloak of fear alters meaning. Listening through fear means we are registering what we have been conditioned to hear through life’s sometimes unpleasant experiences, through our insecurities, our anger, and our jealously. If we’re accustomed to hearing something through this quagmire we’re likely to keep on hearing it that way.

What things sound like when they pass through my filter of fear is this: you don’t deserve success. You aren’t worthy. You’re going to lose what you have because you don’t know how to hold onto it. You don’t know how to do this, so you’re going to fail.

When I listen through my fear, I’m not really hearing what my loved ones have to tell me. I can’t really listen to my children or my partner’s concerns, hurts, pain or trepidation, because all I hear is “you’re going to loose something you love.”

What occurred to me the other night was that I have to listen not with my fear, but with my love.

Though they’d look even sillier blooming out of my chest, I sometimes wished that my ears were'nt so damned close to my brain, but instead were connected directly to my heart.

That way, when I listen to my friends, my colleagues, my children and my partner, all sound would first pass through my heart. When I listen this way, what I might hear would be this: this person is important, and what they are telling you is valuable. Don’t be afraid. Really listen to their words, and feel their feelings, rather than your own. This isn’t just about you; it’s about them. Hear them, not yourself.

Listen with your love, I must remind myself. Love doesn’t judge. Love doesn’t interrupt. Love doesn’t dismiss. Love accepts. Love enfolds, like two arms. Love creates solutions, not barriers. Love trusts. Love believes in.

When I learn to listen with love, not fear, then I might really hear what those I love are saying. Then I will have ears to listen with, not simply hear.