Why do we never listen!

We all have/had someone who constantly keeps nagging us. Parents, partner, siblings, they all have one common complaint, that we never ‘listen’. Today let’s try and understand the reason behind this supposed allegation.

When people say we never listen it has more to do with acting on something rather than the act of converting sound into meaning in our heads. While many don’t even bother doing that, they just consider it as white noise and ignore it all together. Coming back to the problem at hand, why is it that we don’t want to give any importance to the words at hand? There could be reasons like, we could be preoccupied with something at that moment, the person saying it doesn’t have enough credibility to be taken seriously, or what they say generally turns out to be the wrong advice for you or just because we are so full of it, that we consider everyone but ourselves as simply stupid.

More often than not I feel we don’t listen because we are not ready to admit that others actually do make sense. We also know that the other person is right and admitting to ourselves that we are wrong is difficult. At times we might even feel exposed because someone is able to see right through us very easily making us feel naked in the midst of people even with clothes on. At times we don’t listen because on a subconscious level we have lost hope and that no one can say anything to change the fact that things cannot be ‘fixed.’ We don’t listen because we don’t want to believe that something is over as much as we don’t want it to be. We don’t listen because we know that it is going to make us think, confront issues that were shoved into the dusty old closet in our brain. We don’t listen because we know we might just have the answer to make or break someone’s dreams. We don’t listen because listening will make the mind boggle and we are just not ready to face the fact that there is more to us than all the outer supercilious ‘stuff.’

I know I have given a lot of reasons for not listening, but I still think there are many more. Think about it, how easy life would be if only we heard what other people had to say. Whether we like it or not sometimes they answers we look for are repeated to us over and over again and all we have to do is Listen!

* I thought I’d share a funny story regarding this topic. A good example of not listening happened while writing this blog. My brother asked to use my computer for a few minutes. At the risk of losing my train of thought I agreed while telling him to exit an application running in the background since it slows down the internet. 15 minutes later he refuses to give it back to me saying I’m not done yet ‘the pages are taking ages to open up.’ I rest my case!