This Week: Listening With Your Imagination

Plus, some great essays and music.

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Dear fam,

This week, we were very on-brand at the Chaos Palace. Last week, Big Kid finally began attending his new schools. So, of course, this week we were all sick and he stayed home. What is a schedule, again?

We’re also trying to help Baby learn how to fall asleep on her own these days. Which means, essentially, that we’ve given up on sleeping ourselves. Last night, after tossing and turning for an hour, I finally drifted off, only to be awakened a couple of hours later by a crying Baby. She was bereft when I arrived, but began cooing pretty quickly, 3:30 am being the perfect time to have a little chat.

Around 4:15, I woke my wife to be with Baby so I could comfort Big Kid, who had woken up from a bad dream. I’m not sure what happened next, but I woke up on his floor around 5:00 and made my way back to bed, glancing in to see my wife still trying to soothe Baby. The alarm went off at 7:15.

Anyways, I’m on my fourth cup of coffee before noon. And that’s pretty much how we’re doing.

Not everything is bad, though. We’ve been having daily dance parties in the kitchen and Baby and Big Kid have got moves, let me tell you. This morning, we built a pretty impressive fort. Yesterday, we made strawberry-banana popsicles, and we have plans to make rainbow cupcakes. There are opportunities for joy and silliness in the chaos.

One thing that’s been particularly delightful is seeing Big Kid and Baby begin to really interact with one another. They sort of… play together now. A few nights ago, we were all hanging out in Big Kid’s bedroom before bedtime, the kids giggling and jumping on the bed. When it came time for Baby to go to her room to sleep, Big Kid pouted. “Can’t she stay?” he asked, before saying goodnight and giving her a kiss on the head. She beamed and grinned a drooly, toothless grin.

These are the moments that keep me going.

I’ve wanted to write about listening for a while now, but I keep getting distracted by other ideas (as is my custom). There is so much chaos to cover!

Listening is a challenge for Big Kid on two levels. First of all, he’s a four-year-old. Not a population famous for their excellent listening and direction-following capacities. Second, he’s more impulsive than the average bear. Even if he hears what you’re saying, he may be more focused on what he wants to do (say, jumping from one chair to the other) than what you’re saying. Third, he struggles with attention regulation. If you want to get a message across when he’s really focused on something, I wish you the best of luck.

But none of these is the listening struggle that’s most frustrating for my wife and I. The most frustrating challenge, by far, is one I see adults struggling with a lot as well. It’s something I’ve come to call Listening With Your Imagination.

There are times when Big Kid is so upset about something that he’s unable to perceive the actual words I’m saying. Perhaps the spaghetti is not to his liking, and he’s demanding ketchup. It is very possible that my wife or I have acquiesced to this request, but he was so prepared to hear no that he begins to argue with us anyway.

“Listen with your ears, not your imagination,” we tell him, “I’m agreeing with you. Did you hear what I just said?”

I can literally see him do a double-take when he realizes that, hey, that’s right. They said yes to the ketchup. Or whatever. His head shakes a little, as though a spell’s been broken.

It works the other way as well. More than once I’ve gotten annoyed at Big Kid even though he hasn’t done anything wrong. I was listening with my imagination, believing he was going to argue with me and getting pre-exasperated. “I didn’t do anything!” he says, and he’s right.

And, of course, this happens in all our relationships. Once my wife and I realized 90% of our disagreements were based on perceived ideas about what the other one had said, or thought, or intended, we basically stopped fighting. It was as simple as removing subtext from the equation and trusting one another to say what we mean. Frankly, with so little sleep, I’m way to tired to try and figure out any subtexts anyway.

A lot of people these days are listening with their imaginations.

Despite my vow to stay off social media unless it’s absolutely necessary (for work, say), I still see it everywhere. We read a comment and assume the person means us harm, or is our enemy, or holds a certain belief. I hear it in conversations with friends, who tell me they’ve been losing friends over a wrong word or a misinterpreted emoji.

This is not to say that explicitly harmful things are not being said everywhere across the web, and in person. They absolutely are. Right now, the leadership of Substack is trying to tell us, for example, that it’s okay for them to take a percentage of what white supremacists earn on their platform because that’s how free speech works. The words being published by these far-right extremists is vile and definitively harmful. We are not imagining things when we ask for them to be de-platformed.

That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about my friend who expressed sorrow for the deaths of Palestinians and received a litany of angry messages from folks who claimed she must no longer care for Israelis. Which is categorically not true. I’m talking about the Brooklyn woman who posted an Instagram story expressing sorrow for the people she knows who were hurt (or worse) on October 7th, only to be harassed by stranger upon stranger at her place of work.

I’m talking about friendships, family relationships, torn asunder.

We’re not listening to each other. We’re ascribing whole layer-cakes of meaning to each syllable, without taking a moment to ask — and this is crucial — with open curiosity, “What do you mean by that?”

Time and again, when I ask this question and empty my mind of assumptions about what the answer may be, I am surprised. Fruitful conversations (even though they may be difficult) ensue.

I have been very hurt by the words of people — both friends and strangers — in the last 80 days of violence and loss. But when I and others are able to come to one another and listen to what’s being said, free of assumptions, we can both salvage our relationships and grow stronger. It’s still freaking hard. But I think it’s worth it.

One thing I’ve learned by being Big Kid’s mama is to hold space for his hard moments, even if they don’t make sense to me in the moment. When he’s crying or angry about something I don’t get, I say, “I can tell that’s really important to you.” At first, this was an act, but the more I said this the more I came to believe it. Now, I really do empathize with him. We don’t have to agree for me to understand that his pain is real.

One of my favorite Jewish texts is Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of Our Fathers. This collection of wisdom is full of gems; every time I explore it I learn something valuable and new. In the sixth and final chapter of Pirkei Avot, the rabbis list 48 things by which one can become adept at Torah. Of these, I counted at least ten that have to do with listening with an open heart, including “attentive listening,” and “an understanding heart,” and “critical give and take with friends.” To me, the message is clear — we can be as pure or as rigorous in the commandments as we like, but we cannot achieve true engagement with the Torah without wisdom.

Wishing you a shabbat of peace and wholeness, insofar as that’s possible.

Here to listen,

Mikhal

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Information About Israel-Palestine

I’m still committed to sharing important resources and information about this. I think, however, the format I began last week (wherein I do this as a separate email) is a more productive way to go about this. To that end, I’ll share a dedicated newsletter soon with more materials. You can read the last round-up here.

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What I’m reading

• So grateful for have found

  Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert
  , just in time to read LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Callie Miles! who wrote this beautiful passage:

“Collapse and regeneration, my child, is how things work here. The only mistake you could ever make is to believe that mistakes can, in fact, be made. Disintegration holds just as sacred a role in the way of things as integration. It’s what you signed up for to experience when you came here to Earth School — you signed up for the whole wild, unstable-appearing curriculum of it. Stop trying to perfect it. It’s like trying to polish the face of the ocean — why?”

• Also,

  Elizabeth Gilbert
  answered the
  Oldster Magazine
  questionnaire, and the result is just a gorgeous collection of wisdom and joyful inhabiting of oneself. It made me smile so much, and I immediately sent it to a bunch of friends who I thought could use some joy as well. Here’s where you can read Elizabeth’s answers. An excerpt:

“I keep hearing a voice in my head that says, “The second half of your life doesn’t have to look anything like the first half of your life. The first half was bound; the second half is free.” Free, free, ever more free. Free from my own distorted thinking, free from any lingering shame and fear and resentments, free from expectations. This what I look forward to.”

• Louisa Wah
  ’s honest writing about her journey from “human doing to human being” is compelling and beautiful and just plain good for the soul. An excerpt:

“But the fear of not excelling in the roles handed down to me and of disappointing others was eating me alive. I kept pushing myself to rush forward in the imaginary hamster wheel of success, until one day, the hamster collapsed.”