The Art of Listening: an imperfect practice

The people who seem like genuinely good listeners probably drift just as often as the rest of us.

AI-generated: This is really me, just not sitting on a park bench.

Some more thoughts on Knowledge Speaks, but Wisdom Listens — part of the Ten Qualities of a Good Human series.

Someone is talking to you. They’re mid-sentence, saying something that matters to them. And you realise you haven’t heard a word in the last forty seconds. Your mind went elsewhere. To your reply. To tomorrow. To a conversation from last week. You’re here, nodding, but you’re not actually here.

This is where most of us live when it comes to listening. I know this territory well. My own mind rushes ahead, already composing a response while someone else is still mid-thought. It has taken a long time to even notice when this happens.

Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist, wrote in a 1942 letter that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” When we truly attend to another person, we are giving them something rare. When our mind wanders, we briefly withhold it.

But here is what most people don’t say out loud: the shame that follows that realisation does more damage than the wandering itself.

When you catch yourself not listening, there is usually a quick, sharp stab of self-judgement. I should be better at this. What’s wrong with me? That internal noise actually makes it harder to return. Your attention is now split between the person in front of you and the uncomfortable feeling of having failed them.

The mechanics of good listening are genuinely useful: techniques, frameworks, ways of paying closer attention. But there is a quieter truth underneath. No technique will stop your mind from wandering during a conversation. It’s one of the things minds do.

The practice isn’t in preventing the drift. It’s in what happens after.

What happens after is simple, and almost entirely invisible. Something pulls you back. A shift in tone. A word that catches. The sudden awareness of their face. And you return. Quietly, without apology, without needing to confess, you were gone. You come back to this moment, to this person, to the conversation that has been happening without you for a handful of seconds.

Nobody sees that return. But it is, in every sense that matters, the practice.

Listening lives not in sustained, unbroken attention, but in the repeated, quiet choice to come back. Again and again. Without making it mean something terrible about yourself.

The people who seem like genuinely good listeners probably drift just as often as the rest of us. They’ve simply practised the return so many times that the gap between leaving and coming back has become very short.

You will catch yourself somewhere else in the middle of a conversation. Maybe you already have today. That moment of noticing isn’t a failure of listening.

It’s the whole of it.