The Long Arc of Listening: Slowing Down to Truly Hear
Some kinds of listening don’t begin with the ears.
It happens with the whole body - in the pause between questions, in the way your stomach drops when someone speaks a truth too heavy for the room, in the silent nod shared across language barriers. It happens when you stop trying to extract the story and instead sit with its weight.
I didn’t learn this in a lecture theatre. I learned it on dusty roads, in the back of an ambulance, in rooms where the atmosphere spoke before anyone did.
I also learned it by necessity.
I grew up hard of hearing - in a world not built for slowness, not built for pause. I had to learn to listen differently. Not always with sound, but by reading body language and subtle cues. Sometimes I missed things. Sometimes I guessed. Sometimes I got it wrong. But even then, I was trying to hear what mattered most.
I’ve come to believe that the most important skill in health and perhaps in life is not speaking clearly, but listening deeply.
And listening well requires us to slow down.
Slowness in a World That Demands Speed
The pace of work in 2025 is urgent, reactive, relentless. There are deadlines, grants, Zoom calls stacked atop one another like unstable towers. In academia, the churn of output and performance culture leaves little room for stillness.
But some truths won’t be rushed.
Stories of trauma, displacement and loss don’t follow a schedule. When someone tells you about a terminal illness, the moment their village was bombed or their family member was fatally injured, you do not interrupt. You do not nod and pivot to your next point. You breathe. You wait. You let the silence stretch, because that silence is sacred.
Listening as Witnessing
To truly listen is to witness.
Not to diagnose, not to fix, not to translate pain into tidy policy briefs. It is to hold space, with humility and care, for someone else’s truth, even when it’s messy, uncomfortable, or unfinished.
Listening, in those moments, means offering presence without agenda. It means resisting the urge to fix or respond, and instead simply being there fully attentive and fully present as someone carries their pain, their grief, their story. It is in that shared space of quiet witness that healing can begin.
What Slowing Down Has Taught Me
That most people don’t speak in headlines. They speak in spirals, tangents and hesitations.
That trauma doesn’t always arrive in words - it lives in tone, silence, body language.
It’s in the unsaid where the real stories often live, and you only hear them when you stop filling the space with your own voice.
Listening as an Act of Justice
There is power in being heard - especially for those whose voices are so often ignored or misrepresented. Listening becomes political when it challenges whose stories get archived, whose pain is legitimized, and whose knowledge is valued.
It’s not passive. It’s not soft.
It’s radical presence.
What I’m Practicing
These days, I try to build slowness into my work like a quiet resistance:
I leave pauses in conversations and breathe.
I walk instead of scroll.
I journal before I speak - especially about the hard things.
I write here on this blog, letting words take their time.
I listen to the wind through the trees and remember that not all wisdom is human.
This isn’t always easy. The world pulls us toward speed.
And sometimes, I interrupt - especially in online meetings.
Being hard of hearing means I don’t always catch the rhythm of the conversation.
In virtual meetings, where cues blur and voices overlap, I try to follow the thread, but the thread slips.
I speak up at the wrong time, unsure if there’s a pause or just a lag.
It’s not a lack of care; it’s a way of trying to stay present, to not disappear in the gaps.
I’m still learning how to listen - not just with patience, but with compassion for myself, too.
Because listening isn’t always quiet. Sometimes it’s clumsy.
Sometimes it’s messy and imperfect.
But it’s still listening when it comes from a place of care.
This isn’t always easy. The world pulls us toward speed.
I’m learning, again and again, that deep change begins not with answers, but with slow, deliberate listening.
