I was born in the early 90s in a hill station to a voracious reader for a mom. Thanks to our middle-class background, we did not have a cable tv connection until I was in my 9th grade – those were the times of antennas and Doordarshan. The access to the visual content is limited by the newspapers and the children’s weekly, apart from a few programs such as Surabi, Mahabharata, Chandragantha, UGC program and weekend regional film forecast that are time-bound in the Television. My mother being a bookworm, she narrated bedtime stories every night and made aggressive efforts to keep me up very early in the morning to watch the UGC program on the DD1 (Doordarshan Channel 1) in English, which was not easy for me to decode. She never complained about my mediocre scores on my tests but invested her time and energy in building my listening skills.
While I had been a mediocre student, my mother always insisted I sit in the front row of my class and be attentive in the classroom. Nowadays, it is considered inappropriate for parents to discipline their kids through physical punishments. One day, when my mom was tutoring me, briefly when my attention went on a stroll, she caught me red-handed when I failed to repeat what she taught. She gave me a pinch in my thighs that left a blood clot for a week and a scar in my mind for years to come. Her ways to keep me attentive are extreme, but they have paid me big time. My teachers appreciated my attentiveness and for answering questions promptly in the class. All thanks to my mother.
I now realize that I owe so much to her, and I started taking those skills for granted when I failed to apply them in real life and at work sometimes. While this curiosity and listening skills that my mother cultivated gave me an edge in my workspace, the growth was steady. Now I started relying on the internet for information. Assuming people might sell their fiction for facts during conversations. I started validating anything and everything that people speak at the cost of listening – at the dining tables, in the work meetings, sometimes during the personal phone calls etc. Subconsciously, it gave me a high to find them wrong without realizing what I was missing out on, especially in the past three years. I could not think of a better reason than my asocial lifestyle during the pandemic. While I started confiding in auto books while I read from the paperbacks and hardcovers in parallel, I forgot I could apply it during real-life conversations with real people.
After London and staying in an Indian hostel with people from different parts of India between their 20s and 40s, the culture shock and behavioural patterns are diverse. I realize I constantly run into a reactive mode whenever I hear a misogynistic comment about other women or me. I realize ignoring those comments and the people, sometimes, would save some energy and peace. If there is this one skill I need now, it is to differentiate the facts from fiction during the conversations. And that would require wisdom, which takes a lot of listening, sometimes facts checking on the internet but not responding to the conflicts. Now that I realized, thankfully not too late, I am starting to practice intentionally listening and waiting for my turn before I speak.
I want to finish today’s reset with something that I have come across in my email feed from “Pointless Overthinking” while writing the post, “Our lives are shaped from the generosity of others, and sustained through the abundance and the blessings of nature“. In my case, I owe my mother for my listening skills, which she made me practice right from my formative years. I should practice listening diligently for the rest of my life. Thank you, ma!!!
Sharmili unplugged....... 