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Apr 8, 2013

"The first duty of love is to listen." --Paul Tillich

The Difference Between Listening & Hearing

"There is a difference, strong but not always noted, between listening and hearing. You hear the pneumatic drill, though you would rather not listen. You listen for your children's voices in the playground, but you can't always hear them. In urban environments, there's usually a surplus of sound -- so much, in fact, that it often becomes difficult to hear anything at all. But if we become too good at filtering things, have we also damaged our capacity to listen?" What follows is a beautiful essay on listening, by a writer who spent 12 years with an acute hearing impairment.