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It’s such a simple thing. I mean ridiculously simple…. astoundingly simple. Listening.

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It’s such a simple thing. I mean ridiculously simple…. astoundingly simple. Listening. I know, this sounds like a third-grade lecture we all once heard and generally ignored, but the older I grow, the more I appreciate the advice once given me by my old friend Martin Burrus. “Kenny,” he said, “You can pretty much size a feller up by how much he talks about himself.” Martin was one of our area’s most successful businessmen and he was often the subject of newspaper articles and interviews. I was told of one occasion where a reporter for the Springfield paper gave up on the prospect of interviewing Martin, because after a couple of hours sitting there with notepad in hand, he hadn’t learned a thing about the man. Martin was too busy asking the young reporter questions about himself. My dad raised me on the words of Dale Carnegie who said, “You can make more friends in a day by being truly interested in other people, than you can in a month by trying to get other people interested in you.” Amen, Dale. Amen, Martin. Way to go, Elmer. So why do people fail at this so miserably? And who among us doesn’t have at least one friend (and sadly, probably many) who, no matter the subject, will relate it directly to himself? You get to where you cringe to see them coming. I actually had a friend once tell me, “Okay, enough about me. So tell me…what do YOU think about me?” Some people just don’t get it. The problem relates directly to the solution. If you truly care about someone you’ll be curious about his or her life. If you don’t, you won’t. The secret is not in simply shutting up and listening, it’s the modest act of caring. I used to tell my Triopia students who’d constantly “forget” to do their assignments, “No one your age has memory problems. It’s how much you care about the thing. The things you care about, you remember.” I’d ask them the date of the spring prom and they’d know it, along with the score of the state championship football game, their own birthday, and how many days until school was out. Amazingly these kids who a moment ago were suffering from adolescent Alzheimer’s now had total recall. One of my greatest business and professional friendships has been with well-known former District 117 superintendent Bob Crowe. Although his wife Sandy might respond with a differing op-ed piece, the guy is great listener. He looks you in the eyes, he cocks his head slightly to the right, and two years later he can tell you exactly what you said. Perhaps his years in school administration have honed his skills beyond mortal man, but I suspect it’s the simple fact that …at least when I’m around him…he cares about what the speaker’s saying. It’s a rare occasion when Bob will take off on a tangent tale of his own life. In fact, you often have to blast such information out of him. Maybe his past is simply too shady to recount. The ability to listen…..so valuable, so easily acquired, and so very rare. One of the joys of retiring from teaching is the knowledge that I’ll no longer have to take long trips on a school bus, but I can remember one rainy Saturday morning as two other teachers and I loaded 40 teenagers into a wet school bus headed toward a play at St. Louis’s Fox Theatre. One of my co-chaperones wasn’t feeling well and she had been worried about her health for some time. I heard her whisper to the other teacher that she had some nitroglycerin pills in her purse and if anything should happen, her friend should stick a pill under her tongue. My ailing friend was a quiet lady and I know that this bit of admission was tough on her. But instead of showing any sign of concern for a possible heart attack sitting right beside her, the third member of our faculty team launched immediately into a long-winded saga about her own aunt’s heart attack, her own chest pains, and her own grandfather’s death. I changed the topic of conversation before the jabberer moved onto having her dog de-wormed. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. Listening allows our friend to become…to even create themselves. I love Einstein’s estimation of the process: “If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.” A guy named Paul once said, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” And 2000 years later, another Paul, this one named Tillich capped it off with “The first duty of love is to listen.”