The Spaces in Between - the art of listening

One of the things that amazes me is that, as humans, we are actually able to communicate at all. If I think of some of the meetings I have sat in, or discussions I've been part of, we aren't very good at listening.

This is one of the things that being a musician teaches you. To play with other musicians you need to listen, and the way to do that is to create space in the music. The temptation is to fill up the space with stuff, but it's the space that makes the rhythm. Without the spaces, you just have noise.

Now life is like that. If you think about it, there's a lot more space than there is stuff. The universe is full of spaces in between, and yet we think it's the stuff that's so important. Our lives are full of stuff, full of noise. There's the voice of what we think we should be doing, the voice of what we haven't done, the voice of the guy on the news telling us how it is, and then there's the evangelists for consumerism showing us the way to salvation in filling our lives with more and more stuff. We have this wierd fear of open space, unless of course we paid a whole lot for the open space and it belongs to us - added to all the other stuff we own.

And yet deep within us the rhythm is there. Our own hearts beat to the heartbeat of the Universe, just waiting for us to take the time to listen. Waiting for us to look beyond the illusion of all the stuff and find who we are. And so the sun rises and sets, and the moon follows her path in the sky, dancing with the sea. And the winds blow around us trying to get our attention. Telling us gently to awaken from this bad dream, inviting us to dance once again to the music of which we are made..