It is early in the morning as I type this and I am sitting outside with two books in my hand: an old copy of The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck and a new copy of Stephen Cope’s book, The Great Work of Your Life.
Their connection to one another lies, at face value, in the shared exploration of Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken.
As I delved into Stephen Cope’s book inspired by the Bhagavad Gita, a revered Hindu scripture, I reached his chapter on Robert Frost’s life.
Cope proceeds to expand on the renowned poem, it offers up the idea of these crossroads we encounter throughout our lives. He speaks of how we often unfold an old camping chair and place it right in the intersection of our choices, taking the time to ponder over which path to take. Tragically, Cope tells us that many of us fail to make any decision, and spend the rest of our lives in that temporary seat. This reminds me of Devon Brough’s prose that repeats the line ‘Choose your hard’.
It is this that I am thinking about as I read a chapter smack bang in the middle of the old book I’ve just acquired. The middle is an odd place to start, but here we are. The chapter has the title, ‘The Work of Attention.’
The word attention is a BIG word in my field. It is usually accompanied by talk of ADHD, learning difficulties and medication. So it catches my eye.
Usually, these journeys of thought I go on are akin to the strange twists and turns taken by Alice in Wonderland. And they often begin with a solitary sentence on a page that reaches out to me and grabs my focus. The sentence is simply: “The principal form that love takes is attention.”
Of course!
This line runs through my mind in a loop trying to find its connections. I read on.
Peck goes on to speak of the work that love takes, that it is neither passive, nor lazy nor scared – but rather that love takes action, that it is hard work, and that it takes courage. And here it sits, the idea that love is attention. More specifically, that love is listening with attention.
Is listening something we seem to find easy or hard to do?
Post the lockdown of the world, the fallout in families that I am seeing is that we have stretched the elastic band of connection a bit much and we’ve not bounced all the way back. I see far more screen time being allowed with far less supervision. I am seeing parents working longer hours as the lines blur. Stress keeps everyone insular and cut off from one another. Parents are trying to find their feet, trying to decompress and recover, making space for themselves and their own relationships. Screens are ready to lap up our time and suck us further and further away from each other.
If the principal form of love is shown through listening with attention, this new way of being could be very bad news for us all. Anat Baniel talks about movement with attention, in fact it is the first of her nine essentials. Without attention there is no learning. And now we see that without attention, love gets lost.
My thinking is thrown around by this. I am cast back to the book Hold Onto Your Kids, a parenting book written by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté. They talk of children finding their primary attachment no longer with their parents but with their peers and more worrying, with their screens.
They speak about making sure that you collect your children up at the end of the school day and connect with them so that they find their home in your arms and in your words and … now that I read this … in your listening and attention.
The next step is doing the type of listening that strengthens your love and connection. Maté has spoken of this need for attachment (connection) and that children require this and authenticity. The sad story is that if they do not get secure attachment they are prepared to forgo their authentic selves to connect. This makes the argument for listening even stronger.
Peck describes five levels of listening, devoting considerable focus and energy to the final level – the most important and requiring the most effort.
Here they are in ascending order of effort.
1) The first level is to find a child’s chatter annoying and counterproductive and to forbid it. To create a ‘no speaking’ zone in our homes or in the classroom and shut it down.
2) The second level is to allow all of the chatter of a child, but to listen to none of it, to ignore it as if it is meaningless.
3) The third is to pretend to listen. This is to carry on with your own task, whether you’re busy with a chore, work, or scrolling on your phone and let out a series of ‘unh huh’ or ‘that’s nice’ noises in response to the monologue.
4) The fourth level is listening selectively, listening out for keywords that you feel could be important and filter out the chaff for the wheat, only a lot of wheat gets lost.
5) Then there is the fifth way, ‘it is to truly listen to the child, giving him or her your full and complete attention, weighing each word and understanding each sentence.’
The fifth way is the greatest effort and is the highest form of love. Listening takes work. Love takes work.
Along with Neufeld’s request that we reconnect attentively with our children when we pick them up after the school day, and Peck’s suggestion that we truly listen to our children, there are two other pieces of really practical advice.
Peck adds a practice he calls bracketing. “An essential part of true listening is bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside, stepping inside his or her shoes.” This seems to be the idea of empathy.
And Brené Brown gives us this last piece. It is not enough to listen well to another’s story, we also have to believe the other person.
And so, in the pursuit of loving our children, I hope that you take this road worth taking, even if it is hard, because the effort is almost always worth it when it comes to loving our families.
