Dot-to-Dot

Looking around, it appears the dots aren’t connecting and I’m trying to figure out why. I’ve always thought that life’s journey is experiential; a linear flow, building and learning on one life-event to the next. Like a baby learning to crawl, then walk, then run, then ride a bike, then drive and get speeding tickets. All of the wins, failures, heartbreaks, and near misses paved the road of knowledge from there to here. And we survived without the cocoon of bike helmets, car seats, do-overs, and safe spaces. Bumps, bruises, and scars built character and taught the cause-and-effect consequences of decision making.

Some of us have more scars: the risk takers or maybe stubborn life-forcers that have a steeper learning curve. If you’re reading this, you’ve obviously survived weak thought processes that probably make you shake your head in retrospect. And if you have scars on your face or it hurts to stand up once in a while and you mumble out loud, “I remember that one!” you’re in my group of learners.

We’re witnessing a societal change in the learning curve or at least the way information – even basic information – is processed. Maybe it’s that information comes too easily. We have the Library of Congress at our fingertips, with Siri and Google as our ready-reference librarians. While it might help us identify the mating call of the red-headed bush cricket, the massive wealth of accessible information can’t replace the life experience of bumps, bruises, scars, and heartbreak. Some things can’t be learned without skinning a knee or feeling the hollow chill of loss.

I enjoy talking to really old people. It’s as if, through osmosis, I can absorb some of their life experience. I wish I hadn’t been so distracted by life when I was younger. I realize now that I was deaf to pearls of wisdom that could have made my learning curve a lot shallower or at the very least given me first-hand insight into the past.

A few years ago an old timer sat next to me at the counter at Schreiners restaurant. I had seen him several times before. He was always alone. The counter was empty and I thought it kind of odd for someone to sit next to me with all of the available seating.

It was early morning. I was in quiet wake-up mode. He was tall, pale, and dressed in drab baggy clothes that had aged with him over the decades. He always looked straight ahead. His hand trembled as he moved his cup slowly from the counter to take slow sips of coffee.

“Good morning,” I said after a few quiet minutes.

He nodded, looking straight ahead.

Several minutes went by.

“June 6th,” he said.

“You’re birthday?” I asked.

His trembling hand slowly pulled a dull brass cartridge case from his pocket and set it between us on the counter.

I picked it up, thinking he wanted me to take a look. “.30-06″ I said, knowing it was the caliber of the M1 Garand used in WWII. He seemed to be the age.

“Carried that with me every day since Omaha. First wave. And this….” he said, pulling his wallet from his back pocket, showing me a tattered faded black and white photo of a young woman in a dress. “Married me when I got back. She’s been gone fifteen years.”

He didn’t say anything else that morning. He returned the faded treasures to his vault, quietly ate breakfast and left.

I learned his name was Joe. He must have felt comfortable with me or maybe just needed to be near someone because he found me at the counter several times before he ended. I listened.

He spoke quietly, telling me stories about his military service and life with his soulmate that had waited. His life experiences were humbling, often leaving me with no words, just a chill in my spine and lump in my throat. Joe had experienced more life – darkness, terror, joy, pride, and success – than I will if I lived five lifetimes.

He mentioned more than once that he had lived a long life and was “waiting.” He didn’t need to explain.

I learned after not seeing him for a few weeks that Joe wasn’t waiting anymore. And with his ending is the unrecoverable loss of knowledge. For every Joe that ends, a Bieber starts.

I’m glad I listened. I learned more from one old timer than I had from any history text book that I had read in school. And I learned it from a humble, soft-spoken old man with trembling hands that lived it.

Maybe that’s the problem we’re facing right now. As a culture we’re not listening. We’re not listening to old people, each other, authority, or our internal moral compass. Instead we hear soundbites from artificial authority figures like Alec Baldwin, Cameron Diaz, and sports has-beens like Colin Kaepernick, who have no more knowledge than we do but have been raised to a level of influence because of their ability to pretend.

We’re in technology-enabled rapid fire response mode. Quick to text. Quick to post. Quick to react; with fabricated social outrage being the cocoon used to wrap the protected group-of-the-day or anything or anyone endorsed by artificial authority. All the while we remain conversationally deaf, jumping three “texts” ahead, planning responses rather than listening…hearing… processing…learning.

An old friend, Kevin Murphy, wrote a book titled Effective Listening. Having survived upper level corporate America, he understands the basis for effective communication; listening, not just hearing and planning what to say next. Kevin wrote from a business perspective and the importance of listening, while retraining our brains to process the words and nuances of communication. The importance of effective listening holds as true socially and politically in our abbreviated digital communication now more than ever.

Texting and email has created soulless communication and text-deafness. How many times have you received strings of messages that were nothing more than a frustrated thumb-burst continuation of someone’s previous text barrage, where their brain apparently couldn’t process all of the text-junk they wanted to cram into the previous thought. It doesn’t matter if you respond. They’re text-deaf, processing their next dose rather than reading (listening).

That’s not communication.

Think about how much stronger we’d be collectively if we could retrain ourselves to listen and not just hear words and soundbites and then instantly react.