The role that shutting up can play

 From Rob Walker Newsletter:

And it reminded me of a book I read a few weeks back as part of some research I’ve been doing: You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters, by Kate Murphy. (Bookshop.org link.)

Possibly my favorite chapter involves the role that, well, shutting up, can play in listening well to others. This includes something as simple as resisting the very human urge to blurt into every conversational pause and just allow whoever you’re listening to collect and finish their their thoughts.

“To be a good listener is to accept pauses and silences because filling them too soon, much less preemptively, prevents the speaker from communicating what they are perhaps struggling to say.”

That may seem like an intuitive point, but Murphy adds some other, more extreme examples of staying silent that I really liked. Notably:

“For Canadian composer and music educator R. Murray Schafer, silence is a ‘pocket of possibility,’ and to make the point, he sometimes required his students to remain silent for one day. “

Students weren’t crazy about this at first, but:

“At the end of twenty-four hours, many reported a greater awareness and appreciation of not only environmental sounds like the hiss of a lawn sprinkler or murmur of simmering soup but also subtleties in conversation that they would have missed had they been able to talk.”

I appreciate Walker's point about being quiet in conversations because it allows the other/s to say something that they're struggling to say: that it sometimes takes time for someone to formulate a thought and say it that's related to the Eudora Welty famous quote about not knowing what she thinks until she writes and reads it.

I'm thinking this after an afternoon with in-laws where there was a lot of "filling in gaps" in conversation and the gaps felt uncomfortable.  The gaps were filled with conversational crutches that are distinct for each person (the dog, restaurants, stories about people at work (that no one knows)).

For introverted me, these conversations can be exhausting.... like walking on a tightrope. 

What was missing from these conversations, from my point of view, were things like: "I wanted to chat with you about..." or "I was interested to talk to you about..." or "I wanted to share with (especially) you that..." or "I've been thinking about ___ and wanted to pick your brain."