The coronavirus is nothing to ignore. It has already taken more than 6 million lives globally and still accounts for some thousand deaths daily. It also has given unexpected pleasures: more reading and writing time, among many other delights. Yet while most people have not read as much as they could have, and even more have not written much even in a pandemic, most working adults have had more time to listen in the solitude of their home during the quarantine.
Besides the endless barrage of Netflix or Amazon miniseries, what have we listened to? For one, sounds of nature. Just yesterday morning, I heard a persistent drumming I thought was coming from inside my house. When I approached my opened window, I realized the sound was the rain smacking the roof above me. I've also grown familiar with different types of winds slashing against my house and I've begun naming them: rumble, tumble, grumble, jumble, crumble, fumble, stumble, mumble, and humble, in descending order of strength. In addition, I sense contrasting silences at 4:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m., mainly because my tinnitus tends to hum early in the morning and scream late at night. And while the mourning dove's call has been a staple sound in the 38 years I have lived in my house, I have not heard so distinctly as now the heckling song of the mockingbird, the persistent hammering of the woodpecker, and the sharp scratching of claws as squirrels chase each other in dizzying circles up and down my backyard maple and oak trees.
No less pleasurable is the sound of music, which has become much more than just background noise to my reading and writing and household chores. I marvel at the mysteries of life revealed to me through the magical notes of Bill Evans's piano ebbing and flowing through Some Other Time, John Coltrane's soaring tenor saxophone opening My Favorite Things, and Billie Holiday's velvet voice pleading in Love for Sale. I now hear progression, not repetition, in Philip Glass's String Quartet #4. I feel blood course through my veins throughout Duke Ellington's orchestration of Sunset and the Mocking Bird and weep at the climax and resolution of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.
More important than any of these pleasures, listening to you has become a sought-after activity and an improved skill, not because I am getting older and wiser but because I am home more, and more relaxed, patient, contented. What you are saying sounds more purposeful, more interesting to me. You make sense to me, so I think more before responding, cringe more when responding lamely, and smile more when just listening to the silence that follows your wisdom. Less talking, more listening: a good recipe for relationships.