listening is an act of compassion, of love

Page 80 listening is an act of compassion, of love. When we learned a new year, we learned a heart as well. Good listening, the good thing is a skill and like all skills it can be learned.

— from Communication & Conflict (Communication/Conflict) · Socrates Express, In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers By Eric Weiner

In the book

"Listening is an act of compassion, of love — and like every skill, it can be learned." (Sample epigraph — replace with one of your own, or with a line of mine you remember me saying.) Every relationship we have spent the last chapters building — friend, spouse, neighbor, fellow citizen — runs on a single skill, and it is the one we have not yet examined head-on. […] So let me begin where most people end: with listening. Nearly everyone believes communication is about talking. It is mostly about listening — and listening, the old teacher said, is an act of compassion and of love, a skill that, like any skill, can be learned. It is the work of tuning your receiver to the other person's frequency before you ever key your own microphone. — Communication & Conflict (Communication/Conflict)

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