Listen

2009.  Writing wise it was a bummer.  I started the year well with a publication in The Telegraph thinking that this was the start of a great year of writing only for it to be an ill-fated omen and in fact signalled a terrible drought.  The Geneva Times were unable to continue due to financial reasons and since my writing friend Graham passed away early in the year, writing this blog just hasn’t been the same.  He was my number one reader.  It was akin to working for a jovial editor who would ring you up and tell you how well you were doing or most of the time, because Graham was a prize cynic, what a load of rot you were writing.  But still I owe it to him to continue – and to myself for where would I be without this blog to rant and rave and share in all of life’s glory with all you kind readers who take the time to comment and connect?  If I go inwards, quiet the chatter and listen, I can hear Graham’s voice with that particular asthmatic wheeze on the inhalations saying something along the lines of…Well Jules I liked that phrase you used it rather reminds me of … and off he would go reciting some wonderful anecdote from his past.

In 2010 I will try to remember that I have two ears and only one mouth.  If you are a good listener and most of us living in this frenetic world thinking only of ourselves are not, then you have tapped into something far greater than us non-listeners can ever imagine.  Especially if you are so advanced that you listen properly because then you also hear what is NOT being said.  Les non-dits as they say in French.  Ahhh now that is where the nuggets of gold are to be mined.  A classy friend of mine is famous for never criticising or judging.  How she gets her disapproval  across about a certain person or situation is to say…nothing.  Not to mention it or that person at all and so she neither makes herself look bad nor does she pepper the air with negativity and her message is received loud and clear by those of us who know how to listen to her.

If I listen to myself at the closing of this year, I know there is that familiar feeling of nostalgia tinged with sadness around Christmas time.  I’m  not really sure where this comes from, another year passed?  Longing for Christmases past never to return?  Regrets? Who knows.  Sometimes our own personal depths are unfathomable but at least I can listen and acknowledge and say, okay you again, I get it, I know you are there but I’m going to be happy and joyful.  As we all know, happiness is the bedfellow of sorrow, listen to someone cry and it could also be someone laughing and we’ve all laughed cynically in desperation just as we have cried for joy. 

So in 2010 I pledge to pay heed to my own inner voice as well as others, paying particular attention to the pauses, the silences, the words that are unspoken in the gaps between the exhalation and the inhalation because that is where the truth lies.