Escape the chaos with deep listening

"To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically."

I spent this past week in upstate New York. In between running around with kids and catching up with family, I found some time to stop and listen.

Our lives can feel like a steady drumbeat of distractions, often coming from our technology. One way to escape the chaos is with something called deep listening. I first learned about deep listening from Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing.

Here’s how Odell described it in her book:

[Pauline] Oliveros defines the practice as “listening in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds.”

It’s an incredibly relaxing exercise. For me, I found little moments in nature to do nothing except listen to the world around me—birds chirping, critters rustling, distant voices conversing. My favorite was on a kayak in the middle of a lake.

But you don’t need to be on a lake to deep listen or to be more mindful. You can take a walk or sit on a park bench. It doesn’t require any special equipment. Only your ears. And, as I’ve written about before, this kind of thing can help you spark new ideas.

One interesting way to think about deep listening is to distinguish the act of listening from hearing. Here’s Odell again:

She distinguished between listening and hearing: “To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.” The goal and the reward of Deep Listening was a heightened sense of receptivity and a reversal of our usual cultural training, which teaches us to quickly analyze and judge more than to simply observe.

The next time you want a break, or simply want to appreciate the environment, try deep listening.

Thanks for reading.

Eric