“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” – Parker J. Palmer
One of my mentors shared this quote with me about a week ago, and while I haven’t had the time yet to read it in context (it’s from a book by Parker J Palmer called Let Your Life Speak), it’s been with me all week.
“Listen.”
Listen, Hap. Listen. To yourself. And to your life.
In so many ways, I’ve been getting better at this over the past couple of years – you might even say that I’ve actually grown in my ability to give myself the freedom to do this one simple thing: learning to listen. Not just to everyone else around me (both a gift and a byproduct of being an INFP) but to myself. Learning to notice the tell-tale signs that I’ve been running too hard, too fast, for too long, and then stopping in my tracks because of it, instead of continuing to keep on going in unhealthy ways.
But the listening that Palmer seems to be talking about is even deeper than that. This kind of listening seems to be about more than knowing your emotions, your thoughts, and your body, and recognizing what they are trying to tell you. This seems to be more about listening to your whole life – paying attention to who you’ve been and why, and what that means on the road to becoming who you are.
I think in some small ways I’ve already begun to do this. I’ve been looking for patterns in the things that I write about, think about, pray about. I’ve analyzed my writing and attempted to break it down into specific categories, in an attempt to figure out what it is that I am already passionate about, and to then determine: is this the “THE” – the one thing that I am meant to talk about, write about, be about – or am I still on a journey towards discovering what it is? (Is there just one thing?)
photo courtesy of ©Depositphotos.com / szefei
“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.”
It seems to me that this requires a deep level of surrender and trust – in both yourself and in God.
To truly listen to your life, you need to surrender your own pre-conceived ideas about who you are. You need to let go of all the opinions that have been thrown at you, solicited and unsolicited. You need to let go of the ideas and opinions that even those who know you best may have about you, too. You need to surrender all of it, to let it go completely, so that you can hear clearly, without interference.
And you need to trust. Trust that your life will actually speak true, in spite of the hundred and one amazingly sad ways in which we can successfully choose to deceive ourselves daily. Trust that God has been at work in your life since the day you were born, and none of it, no matter how clearly impacted by free will, was random. Trust that the patterns and themes and truths that emerge will be the ones you were meant to see, and that He will help you see them.
I’m not sure there’s a formula for how you do that. I think it might be more of an attitude – a choice to be open, a willingness to surrender, a longing to trust. And I think it takes time. Careful, intentional time. Probably with a journal. Likely with silence.
At any rate – it’s something I want to do more of, this learning to listen. Not just to my self, but to my life. I’m seriously curious to hear what it has say.
