Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Escuchar

A short post today, more of a reflection than anything, about learning languages and learning places.

I know that I'm usually quite the talker, but today was a reminder that some days are meant for just listening. Listening to the sounds of a stranger, driving down the street where you're staying, shouting on a megaphone loudly and proudly, with words and language that you don't understand. Listening to verb tenses from a teacher and the difference in prepositions, trying to override the French rules that my teachers spent years drilling into my ears. Listening to your colleagues tell stories of times before you were born or lived in what you now call your home, while sitting on the balcony, sipping your cold beer and checking out your neighbors' balconies. Listening to your teacher explain that no matter what country her students come from, they all report the same thing: "Government everywhere is corrupt. The best of men fall with the rest of the worst, and hope can be hard to hold onto." Today was a day for conversations, but while I stumbled with contributing, I felt my ears open a little more clearly to the words of my colleagues, my teachers, and all those around me. I could even hear the key turning more easily into the door, with its impossible locks (and so many at that!), my fingers and ears recognizing the clear clicks of the locks sliding into place.

But there's another kind of listening too that I had to do today. I listened to my body. After sleeping poorly last night, battling some combination of uncertainty in my surroundings and a longing for the familiar, I listened inwardly and tried to articulate something out of that unease. The rampant poverty, the disgust my professor expressed in the way things work (or don't) here, the sense of anxiety I feel as darkness falls in a city that I don't know or understand, the developing understanding of where many of my students are coming from, and the constant reminder that I am a white, American, English-speaking, female stranger here who calls attention to herself just simply by walking outside, all of a sudden I felt all of this bubbling in me and thought that I can't take any more in just yet. I need to sit with this first. So I listened. I took the afternoon off, tried to relax, attempted to watch cooking shows in Spanish and breathe. I napped, too. Classic. 

I didn't wake up feeling any sense that I had overcome any of this confusion, or feeling of being overwhelmed. But I did wake up understanding that I don't have to be comfortable all of the time, just so long as I am open to listening.

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