Listen Hard

      there is no silence long enough to keep me

       from listening to your heart and celebrating the

       vastness of your spirit.

      remember the difference between

       looking and seeing

      (remember the difference between

       hearing and listening.)

      One of my best pals is eight. She advises me on fashion, shares her opinions on my food choices (many of which she approves, by the way), and tries to teach me jazz moves that make me apprehensive about the way she wants me to position my older self. A pretzel comes to mind. She shares her opinion about the way I “screw up” my face.

      “Why are you screwing up your face like that?” she used to ask with frequency.

      “I'm listening to you.”

      “But why does it look like it hurts?” was her well-founded question.

      “Because I'm listening to you so hard.”

      “Maybe you should listen a little lighter—you're going to give yourself wrinkles.”

      Her advice continues to be reasonably sound. A recent check in the mirror bears out her assessment. Between laughing hard and listening hard, I've tracked some well-earned line miles across my face.

      When I listen to someone I hear their words in the same way I hear my own words when I am typing quickly. I have a tactile encounter with each word in order to type it accurately. If I were to rewrite this phrase I might consider amending it to “listen hard and well,” for there's a little magic in listening well—to hearing what is being said as well as what is not being said. Oh, volumes have been written on why it is that we come to have so many misunderstandings. But not in this volume. I still have many misunderstandings with my words—bring offense when none is meant. I have much to learn on this note.

      Life experiences and maturity help us to know when listening hard and well means discounting some of what is being heard. It means coming to understand that one thing said can actually mean something else. This is how humor works. And gentle suggestions.

      For weeks in advance of my fifth birthday I was very busy communicating with everyone in my family that I would like a birthday party with my neighborhood friends, a birthday cake with candles and balloons. I didn't even mention presents. I thought the party would be enough. I had just completed a string of birthday parties for my pals and I thought that it would be the finest thing to turn five with a party of my own.

      My suggestions were met with disinterest and deferral. I waged a campaign. I sought justifications. I offered strategies to make the party easier. I would concede the balloons. No. Not yet. Everyone thought maybe a party would be a good idea when I turned six.

      I was clear. I would give up birthday parties for many subsequent years but, just like my friends, I wanted a party when I turned five. I was unsuccessful in all my lobbying. And I was one disappointed four-year-old.

      There was one bright spot on the day of my birthday. My sister said that I could go to the library and check out three books. Three! At one time. Now that I was five I guess this was the privilege that came with maturity. It wasn't fully able to assuage my loss of the long-hoped-for party, but it came darn close.

      I had selected two books when suddenly my sister became urgent about wanting to go.

      “I've only got two books.”

      “You can only read one at a time,” she observed. This was not precisely accurate but I could see she was inexplicably in no mood to negotiate. I wasn't leaving without three books so I threw my last deliberation to chance and grabbed a book off the shelf.

      I'd seen folks launching kites and it occurred to me from the way my sister was hauling me home that maybe if I'd had a tail she might have been able to let me out on a string and fly me like a kite. This girl was in one kind of hurry.

      It seemed odd to me that she insisted on taking my books as we came to the steps of our house. More negotiating. They were mine. All three. I handed them over. Distracted, I pushed through the door to a torrent of leaping children, streamers and balloons, and staccato screams of “Surprise! Surprise, surprise!”

      I was surprised all right. There was a banner over the mirror above the mantle announcing “It's your birthday!!!” I didn't think I was the one who needed reminding; it was my family who had all appearances of forgetting that I was turning five.

      I surveyed the room, speechless. Yes. There were balloons. A cake with unlit candles on the table. Wow! A pile of presents. What mad plan had this been? I was stunned. My entire family had lied to me for weeks. Liars, all of them? If you can't believe your family, who can you believe? I wondered. The neighbor children had stopped leaping. The calls of surprise had dwindled to bewilderment. Everyone in the room stared at me as my face crumpled and I began to cry. Steve West, my best pal, came to offer me the only solace he had: “Whataya crying for? It's your birthday.”

      Again what? Was I the one who needed to be reminded? I had asked. For weeks. I had communicated clearly what I wanted. What joke was this? I ran into the room adjacent to the living room and helped myself into the linen closet where I shut the door behind me and cried.

      Graciously, someone laid the arm down on an album and started in with games. Without me. A few minutes later my sister came in with tissues. She offered that nobody meant to hurt my feelings—they wanted to surprise me. I explained that the only surprise that I had was that I was surprised everyone had forgotten my birthday and then I was surprised that everyone had lied. Neither one of us can now remember how long it took her to talk me out of the linen closet. But she eventually did. Just in time for cake.

      Life experiences draw certain subtleties for us. They expand our ways of listening and give us other tools for understanding what people are saying and what they are not saying; what it is they say they want and what it is they really want.

      It was clear what I wanted. My family wanted something different. I learned, as I grew older, that this is not just the way of families, but of all relationships. Even when you “listen hard” you can be unclear as to what someone really wants.

      Wouldn't you just imagine that it was quite some time before I could actually enjoy the process of a surprise party. Actually, I've never really enjoyed a surprise party. Perhaps some day I'll learn a new way.

      There are many people whose words have influenced me. Some of those words, and some of their stories, are salted throughout this book. As I contemplated the effects of those words upon me, I turned the thinking upside down and wondered if I could discover a stranger upon whom my words had some sort of effect. I am grateful for my loyal customers who graciously take the time to let me know the place my words have in their life. But I wanted to go in search of someone who lived with intention, used my words, but didn't know me. I went to the Internet and entered some of the key words from the “Live with Intention” text. Numbers of websites responded to the search. One particular site caught my attention. There my search began and ended.

      “The