Listening

A while back, I made a discovery.

Ironically, it happened while I had the radio on in the background, and I heard a recording of Rosanne Cash’s “Money Road” coming across the airwaves.

The irony probably has to be made clear though. I have long since been a huge fan of Frank Zappa — I think I have attended more Frank Zappa concerts than any other artist. FZ also released a bunch of live recordings near the end of his career, one of which was a recording of “Ring of Fire”, which Johnny Cash was also supposed to join in and sing along on … but FZ then announced this was not possible because “his wife got sick”. Well, to cut to the chase: FZ did the vocals … and then when he sang the first verse again (because there is only one verse in the song), FZ commented that repeating the same verse “is one way of learning English”.

Now back to my “aha” realization moment that happened while listening to “Money Road”. The phrase “Money Road” makes no clear sense, but it drove something home nonetheless. The vocabulary of music lyrics is very impactful, especially insofar as popular music is often repeated. I’ve also paid much more attention to the vocabulary of popular music — for example, how the Beatles mainly used words even a preschooler could understand.

Well, that is all a very long and roundabout way of introducing today’s topic — namely: listening. I checked my dictionary, and yet I am still not certain whether the word has a similar etymology (origin) to the word “list” (from “making a list”).

The reason why I wish to highlight listening today has been on my mind for several months (maybe even years?), and I feel that I need to finally break my own silence on it now.

The main reason the impetus to writing about this topic has been accumulating over such a long period of time is that I have had to sort of force myself to become aware of it.

On one of my other blogs (Wants.blog), I write quite regularly (generally 5 days a week) about stuff people say they want (see “I Want More Sharing of Experiences in Shared Languages” for a short description as to how this blog came into being).

Over the years, it has become ever more obvious to me that the vast majority of bloggers want (or even expect) that other people will read (i.e. listen) to what they have to say, yet very few bloggers are willing to actually read what other people are writing (i.e. saying).

Several months ago, the coin finally dropped: I distinctly remember becoming aware of how this is actually a violation of Jesus’ “Golden Rule” — in other words: we ought to listen to others, much in the same way that we want others to listen to us.