EPISODE 3: THE SECRET TO SUCCESSFUL ADVENTURES IS LISTENING
Finished my first turn to the left (by car) … now about to turn left again (by bike).
I arrived in Bellevue, Washington a few days ago. Thus ending the first part of the adventure. According to Google, the trip from Portland Maine to here by car could have taken as little as two-and-a-half days. I planned 10. I spent 18. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re open to taking side roads and embellishing locations with spontaneous sojourns (while still needing to work).
Bellevue is where I was born (though half my life has been spent, not only away from here, but away from the US in general). Here, there were around 60,000 residents in 1968, which has trebled since the inclusion of Microsoft, Amazon and other large, influential companies. Back then it was only Boeing … and mountains and sea. Boeing had just laid off thousands of employees. The uncertainty was stark — much like now. My Padre told me that there was a sign at Seatac airport saying … “The last one to leave, please turn out the lights”. The lights dimmed. But now they’re bright.
I was born in a rush in a brightly lit hallway of a Seattle hospital en route to the birthing room. Sort of set the stage for the rest of my life. The first words my brain ‘heard’ when coming into the world were from my mum saying… “what’s wrong!”
You see, I was the fifth child. Four females had come before me. Back then you were pulled up by your feet and your bottom smacked to make you cry — thus initiating your first living breaths, stinging with the reality of what was to come … more living. When baby girls are born and held aloft upside down they have clean lines forming a ‘V’. At least that’s how my Mum describes the vision of her first four births. Boys are different. Their lines are not clean.
Remember, perception is grounded in our past experiences. And those experiences are engendered in our neural circuitry, which gives rise to our assumptions and biases. The assumptions encoded in my Mum’s brain at that moment in time was that I was her fifth girl … who was being held aloft and crying. Given this assumption, her poor little girl must be deformed. After all, my ‘lines’ were completely wrong … for a girl!
Because our perceptions and actions are a conscious manifestation of our brain’s deeply encoded assumptions that reflect our ‘lived history’ …
… we all make sense to ourselves … just not to other people.
Everything you’re reading right now in this blog is literally meaningless — since language is not a law of physics that exists when we’re not here. You are creating the meaning of my words based on your history. And you are projecting that meaning onto me, whether or not your meaning was what was intended. In the same way, my mum’s meaning: ‘What’s wrong!’ made complete sense to her … until the nurse whispered … “There’s nothing wrong dear … it’s a boy” (the ‘wrong’ bit came later, and many times over!).
My three gorgeous gremlins (Zanna, Misha and Theo) love listening to this story. But much more so when their grandmother tells it. Which brings me to the point of this blog: How you listen and what you listen to is what will define your adventure. Not just now, but in life, in love and in yourself.
To truly listen, then, is not to listen without assumptions — that’s impossible. It’s to listen with ‘perceptual awareness’: The awareness that you have assumptions, and that they will shape what you hear (and see, feel and do) … at least initially. Hence why true listening i.e., the kind of listening that will expand you and deepen your relationship to the world, requires humility combined with the desire (if not need) to understand the world … whether ‘that’ world is the world of another person or the natural world itself from which we all extend.
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