A couple of days ago I sent a message to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) complaining that their offering of Great Performances only airs in the middle of the night on their Kansas City, Missouri affiliate. PBS advertises Great Performances nationwide as airing at 8pm. I mused that Kansas City Public Television (KCPT) must underestimate their audience in prime time. I’m fairly certain that PBS doesn’t read my messages and could likely care less, BUT a person that I didn’t know responded to my message by asking, “Why do you say so?” I was absolutely stopped cold! First of all, that someone I didn’t know wanted to listen to why I said what I did, and secondly realized I hadn’t really thought through my post before writing it. I wrote an explanation back to him (after thinking about it for quite awhile) saying that KCPT must think their audience unsophisticated/uneducated or just not interested in the Broadway shows/concerts, the opera and other offerings of Great Performances. Someone was actually interested in listening to what I thought, someone I didn’t know. He wanted to listen to my point of view.
After some additional thought, it occurred to me that very few people are really listening to what others are saying or thinking these days. Everyone, myself included, are quite willing to snark about almost everything as if what we say, post or write is truth. That has made me furious but I have been doing it as well. From hate speech to conspiracy theories to whatever the last thing people heard on whatever media outlets they watch or listen to, there seems to be only emoticon responses. Or unfriending/blocking/or a plea to fact check but no real attempt to find out “Why do they say so?”
I think “Why do you say so” is a better response than ignoring a point of view that you don’t agree with. Or arguing about it. Or somehow just deciding that people are just on the wrong side of information. I have also decided that asking a simple question like, “Why do you say so?, and truly listening to the answer is a lost art. I have friends who are perpetual questioners, but most of the time I don’t think they really listen to the answers and have already moved on to their next sentence. Likely most of the time in our immediacy culture, real discussions never occur. The poet with a very long name, Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke once said, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, along some distant day, you will gradually, without even noticing it, happen into the answers.”
Children are probably the best at listening when it is important. They truly are little sponges wanting to learn and form their own identities. We should listen to the words wonderfully written by the great lyricist, Stephen Sondheim for his musical, Into The Woods, and be more like children when seeking information and answers, “Careful the things you say, Children will listen. Careful the things you do, Children will see and learn. Careful the tale you tell, Children will listen. Replace the word Children with People and maybe that is the answer. And we should all, every day, ask, “Why do you say so?”
Merci beaucoup to Keith from Illinois for Rilke. Merci beaucoup to Bill in Michigan who introduced me to Stephen Sondheim. And to Jacob from Georgia, Merci beaucoup for your question. A question that I now will be asking over and over! And…..
J’ecouterai.