A time to commit

By JoAnne Young

This week I listened to a father tell a story about his own listening to Debussy’s Claire de Lune while mourning the loss of a baby. I could hear that haunting piano along with him as he read out loud the essay he had written about the empty space the baby left in his and his wife’s house and life. 

 

“I don’t just play it to remind myself,” he wrote. “I play it to live in the fade of each note and dance with your spirit. It is the closest that I will ever come to holding your hand.” 

 

Hearing, one of our five big senses, is a great human gift. There are other beings who have better hearing than we do, using it mostly for survival. Ours helps us to survive, too, but also in large part to connect and to find pleasure, even delight, when we go a step further and really listen. 

 

In recent years, I have come up with a word each January that will guide me through the new year. Last year it was “connection.” For 2024, I had decided to continue with the word connection because it had served me well. But as I took a cold walk around Holmes Lake one morning and listened to winter becoming spring in the drumming of woodpeckers, the lapping of water that had lost its last skim of ice, the scampering of a squirrel up the bark of a tree with leaves for her nest, I decided to add listening to my 2024 intentions. 

 

There is so much to listening, not the least of which is listening to people, our families, our friends, our politicians (just enough to know what they’re up to), and those who can guide us, teach us or just make us laugh. One of my vows on that cold morning walk was to listen this year for understanding, without judgment, agenda or distraction. 

 

I will make one exception. Politicians.

 

I had an opportunity recently to inquire with the Nebraska Attorney General’s office about interviewing and writing a profile on a woman – Grace Johnson, an Oglala Sioux Tribe member – who had been hired last fall as the liaison for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons in Nebraska, a long ignored, troubling issue that is finally getting attention. 

 

The office said no, I could not talk to her, even though the Nebraska Legislature funded the position to improve these needed investigations and disclosures. 

I appealed to Attorney General Mike Hilgers, himself, reminding him about the national media’s high profile interest in this, on television series and movies, that Nebraskans should know something about the woman who taxpayers are funding, what motivates her and what she specifically is doing. Nebraskans should be able to listen to her directly. 

 

He said they “had challenges with that,” even though “Grace is a wonderful person. She’s doing amazing work.” Maybe, he said, there’s a way to meet in the middle. But there was, honestly, no middle. A disservice, when listening is blocked, to her, the Legislature, the Native population and its missing people, and the rest of us. 

 

I tried. Didn’t succeed. So onward with my year of listening through conversations, music, reading, the sounds of nature, TV, movies, plays, podcasts, body language and the soulful eyes of our pets.

 

I’ll devote much of my listening to others through conversation. 

 

We listen, on average, to about 20,000 or more words each day. On some days, much more than that. Women speak an average of 16,215 words a day. Men rack up about 15,669, according to a University of Arizona study. That’s an average of 950 words in an hour, give or take. 

 

Part of my commitment to listening this year will be to listen for understanding, to pay attention, to learn, rather than thinking about what to say next. And at the end of each day, I will take note of the best thing I heard that day. 

 

Today, it was once again on a walk at the lake: a herd of young people running up behind me on the path, the staccato sound of each shoe hitting the gravel in soft rhythm. I can’t rightfully describe the joy that brought. 

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