Listening

It is said that God gave us two ears, two eyes and one mouth with the intention that we will use them in the same ratio i.e. look and listen more and speak less. But most of us seem to have missed the point and perhaps talk more than necessary and definitely talk more than we listen. As children we are often asked to "listen" but the people saying the word seldom seem to do so themselves. And so we learn from what they do and not what they say. When we become adults, we too, speak more and hardly ever listen.

Listening is a skill that most communication workshops talk about a lot. It is about focusing on the words of others so that we can communicate more effectively. But I am talking about a different kind of listening, listening to yourself. That is what meditation is about. When you start quietly observing the frantic thoughts racing around your head, the thoughts get self-conscious, they pause, sometimes even come to a grinding halt. Just for a fleeting moment, the pool is still and when you peek into it, what do you see? Your own shadow, not obscured by the ripples. Similarly, when you are stuck, confused or at cross-roads, we seek the counsel of others, hoping to find a solution externally. Ignorant to the basic fact that the solution to our problem lies within us.

My experiments with meditation continue on a daily basis. Here is what happened last week. My printer was jammed with an aborted printout. I tried the only method I knew of opening the back door and pulled out the offending sheet harshly until I realized that I had ripped the paper and now one half of it was irretrievably stuck in the mysterious plastic and metal interiors. A few days passed by. I need the printer on a daily basis and it was not a good situation to be in. Before going to bed one night, I relaxed my thoughts and sent out a message to the universe asking for a simple fix to the problem. I woke up the next morning with one clear message, as though someone had whispered it to me just before awakening. "Read the manual."

I am sure even the book "How to use printers for dummies" (if there is such a book) points to the manual for troubleshooting. But I decided to do as suggested and read the manual and voila! There was no section on how to clear paper jam, in all the 8 languages in which the booklet was published. So much for divine messages! I skimmed the pages and found a diagram naming the parts with little arrows pointing to the sections. On an impulse, I pulled up on one side and lo and behold, it opened up the section where tiny curly strips of the jammed paper were clearly visible. I joyously removed the bits and expected the printer to get back on track. But the paper jam message persisted. Now that I was already looking at the innards of the printer, I felt bold enough to explore hitherto unexposed internal organs and finally located the missing paper bits. Once those were removed, my printer chugged back to life like the active 4 year old that it is.

Moral of the story - I pursue my meditation with a renewed faith in the capacity of my brain to provide me the solutions I require (not just for mundane IT stuff). All I need to do is meet the necessary condition - of listening.