Listen to fishies

“Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.” – Samuel Butler

I’m curious about BOSE® QuietComfort® Acoustic Noise Cancelling® Headphones.

My life and jobs have taken me to over 60 countries, some just for a few days; others like Sri Lanka and Germany for many months—I was privileged to bump up against the planet’s amazing humans and our diverse ways of being in the world, allowed to see firsthand the tip of the culture iceberg and sometimes at least small glimpses into that deeper, darker part below the water line—the part that can get dangerous if you don’t know it’s there—enlarging with frequent flyer miles the worldview that began in a small Southern town with one movie theatre, one barbershop—my Daddy’s—and hardly any Catholics.

So I’ve measured out my life not in coffee spoons, but in Boeing seats, a long line of 9As and 17Cs, anything but middles!, winging from port to port in unnatural seated positions with nothing but air and hope beneath me, important in my power suit once landed, leading a board of directors from one bilateral meeting to another while they complained about Spanish restaurants not opening until 9pm (those late-eating European heathens!), staying in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo where their complaints centered on room size—imagine the nerve of Mr. Wright being culturally alert!, circumnavigating the globe on a ship for four months, watching the new year arrive over Sydney harbor, speaking at a South African conference just after Mandela was elected, sampling pepper vodka in an amazing Russian restaurant in Helsinki, seeing Picasso’s “Guernica” in Spain, and standing in front of all the pieces of my favorite—Paolo Uccello’s “Battle of San Romano”—in Florence, Paris, and London, spread as it is around the world. [Uccello, by the way, was the son of a barber; perhaps that explains the connection I feel to him. Or maybe it was those wacky polyhedral hats.]

All those meanderings were true gifts, a visceral reminder of the same and not same, the known and not known, the understood and not understood, and the feared and not feared in this planet of ours.

And so, I lived at 37,000 feet with a seat belt fastened low and tight across my lap for years, crisscrossing the globe like one of those maps with red tacks and skinny threads in a War Room or on that nice television show, CSI, where they’re forever tracking a serial killer who strikes at consistent distances between subway stops and pretzel stands, creating lines of connection that still remain, quiet sometimes and then emerging, friends around the world.

In the fall of 1995, I returned after three weeks abroad, an exhausting but satisfying trip, resulting in Successful and Of Course Important Business Stuff and, more importantly, meeting a wise and funny man named Eliav, a former Israeli tank commander who writes about leadership issues and who always makes me both think and laugh, an undeniably fantastic combination, in any language.

On Sunday morning after I arrived, my daughter Emma—then 3 years old—snuggled into bed to welcome me home with laughter, shrieking, tickling happiness. And then she spoke, holding my face in her hands: “Mama,” she said quietly. “I had a lot of dreams while you were gone.”

“What’d you dream about, Peanut?” I said, hardly stopping for the answer as I prepared to swoop her up and make chocolate chip pancakes, the batter a simple delivery device for the cocoa.

“I dreamed I was a little tiny fish in a big, big ocean, and I couldn’t find my mommy.”

(                         ). That’s a picture of my stunned silence, as I looked at my husband, John, from across the bed. I had finally stopped flying long enough to hear her. She stopped me cold.

Yes. Well. It was a clear message. A message that comes along once—a message that begs to be listened to, one where you hope the noise around it is reduced enough so you can actually hear the real part, the part you should hear and heed and do something about, the part where you need the noise of airplane engines to stop so they won’t keep the message from emerging. That’s what got me thinking about those BOSE® QuietComfort® 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® Headphones. Sometimes I need the quiet they would provide, without the cutting-me-off-from-others part I see so much, that inalienable sanctity that is created, a bubble of solitude in which not only do you stop the noise, you also stop the singing, the connection, the dialogue.

There’s so much noise in the world, isn’t there? So much more than those summers when I played outside in the creek all day, coming home only when I heard my father whistle for dinnertime. Now, constant noise, warnings, static surround me—in the Atlanta airport last Wednesday, television sets blared with nothing but bad news, loud-voiced people shouted instructions about boarding by zone, and, yes, of course—I was surrounded by Ubiquitous Cell Phone Conversations that all begin with a kind of Global Positioning Announcement, placing Self in Universe in Time: “Yes, I’m at the gate now,” “We just landed! I’m still on the plane!” “I’m walking toward baggage claim” “It’s 10:00 here!” or my personal favorite, “I’m in the bathroom; hold on a minute.” [Really, must I participate in their every movement?]

Emma’s tiny fish dream was a clear and true one; it was a message I listened to, leaving my job a few months afterwards. As much as I enjoyed the work, there was no contest: she was my life, not business meetings with people I would never see again, not platinum Delta cards that like a lottery just provide me an opportunity to compete more effectively to sit in nicer chairs periodically, not a passport that served as a brag book, a talisman of importance, and not all the fancy restaurants and hotels in the world. This little human needed me to be here to laugh with her and kiss her boo-boos and teach her how to tie her little tiny shoes, not collect countries like so many notches on my bedpost.

And so I finally heard her little three-year-old wisdom.

What does it mean to really listen to the messages that are all around us, the things that do—indeed—come from the mouths of babes? Where there are migraines, there’s a message, isn’t there? Where there is fatigue, a message is desperately trying to escape. Where there is dread, there’s a story. What does it mean to really hear, to reduce the noise to its most important elements, to stop long enough to hear beyond or inside the static, that busyness, all that damn communication? How hard it is to hear the things we really need to hear.

If life is too noisy and it’s headphones I seek—even metaphorically—at what point am I escaping the noise by disconnecting altogether?

When I turn on my microwave, the radio that sits near it becomes full of static, making it hard to hear those nice people on NPR. When I pretend to listen to someone while checking my email or when I ask a question without waiting for the answer or deflecting the answers I don’t want to hear, the same thing happens: static, dispersion of attention, a reduction of the teller and the listener, both.

My husband, John, was once called to appraise the library of a pediatrician who had practiced for 50 years. Alzheimer’s was capturing the doctor’s mind and his family wanted to take care of his library before he slipped into deeper fog. As John asked questions of him, this straight, tall, patrician physician kept wondering whether the books were his golf clubs.

Undaunted, John continued: “tell me, doctor, after working with children for 50 years, what’s your biggest lesson about kids?”

Suddenly the doctor snapped to attention, emerging from the dusk of disease to answer with great clarity: “Never, never interrupt a child when a child is speaking to you.” And with that, he was back to his golf clubs.

Never interrupt in order that you might hear what they really want to say, to go where they want to take you, not where you want to go, to move at their speed, not yours, to hear those little fishies when they’re telling you something important–children or adults alike.

Emma’s 13 now—and needs me here probably even more now to help her navigate all kinds of scary middle school “noise”: algebra, finding one’s way in the world of infinite possibilities, navigating the awkward and constantly changing universe of friends, the epidemic of casual sex among very young people, not to mention the whole drugs, drinking, and now the choking game mania. It’s a lot to navigate if you’re 13, so I’m trying to help by being here, by staying home more, by listening to the spaces between the words more. (Remember, “more” is a relative term.)

And now, I’ve got another small fishie in the house. Tess is two and a half this month. But I’ve learned, haven’t I? I really took Emma’s tiny fish message to heart and changed my life. Didn’t I?

Tess speaks in full paragraphs now after starting with one-word phrases (“Peace!” with two outstretched fingers was one of her first, my little hippy baby), then two-word declarations (“MY bottle!”). Pseudo-sentences followed (“Daddy on a bike!” was her first, documenting that momentous occasion when she saw John magically floating toward her on an object that others called a bike). She’s deep into complicated paragraphs now, intricate tales about ducks and horses and fire trucks and delicious popsicles that inevitably all begin the same way: “One day….”

One of her very first phrases?

“Mama on a plane!”

Perhaps I’ve got more work to do.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Remember that tiny fish in a big, big ocean. Find a way to hear what it’s saying to you.

Identify the spam in your life. Like everything else, it’s a metaphor—it is noise, distraction, static that is filling up the spaces. What’s the static that prevents me from hearing myself? If it really is fear, what am I so afraid of hearing?