Continue reading »]]> On the occasion of the Mayday protests, below is an essay I wrote last Thanksgiving after spending some time with Occupy Wall Street. Be well!

Looking at the Occupy Wall Street protests outside your windows and across the country you might understandably be confused. What are they doing, the protestors? What do they want? If only they could clarify their goals then we could determine whether we’re for them or against them and put their stickers on our bumpers or their asses in our jails, if need be. If only they were more clear.

But the thing is, they’ve already made it crystal clear what they’re protesting for. It’s not for socialism or communism or wealth repatriation or whatever the popular term of the day is; it’s not for health care, or even for taxes on the rich or for jobs. The protestors want these things, certainly, but those are just manifestations of something deeper.

So what is that thing? What is this whole protest about?

In a word: decency.

Decency– the unspoken agreement to be fair and kind and just to our fellows — is the very thing that holds society together. And decency has been disappearing in our society.  With our families, our friends and the other people we meet in the day-to-day, and in our relationships to the world itself, decency is being lost. This is what brings protestors out to the streets in snow and wind and rain.

Turn on Fox News and what is transfixing about it (or horrifying) is not the illuminating discussions of tax codes and job creation and constitutional law but the utter lack of decency. Hosts yell at guests, guests yell at hosts – and these are people who agree! It heralds a world utterly without decency, founded instead on rage.

What  stays with you is not the logic of their arguments but their ferocity.

Rage is powerful. Rage is cleansing. Rage supersedes doubt and fear. Rage posits there is a right way and a wrong way, black and a white, my way and yours. And the world is so complicated — how wonderful to have it reduced to black and white! So immigrants have to leave or you’re an amnesty magnet. Taxes must be cut or you’re a socialist. You agree with everything I say or you hate America.

So cleansing in its simplicity, is rage, but it lacks all decency.

Now, the experts are saying that the protestors will lose their moment. That it will get cold and they’ll go home and the bankers will still be banking and the system gamers will still be have the system gamed. The protest will have lost.

This misses the crucial point: decency always loses. Always. Decency, in fact, only wins by losing. When decency meets rage in an alley, rage will beat it black and blue, and will then, if necessary, arrest it and explain why it had no choice in the matter. Decency against rage – it’s a no-contest.

So decency loses. It gets up. It loses again. It gets up. It loses again. And again. You get the picture. But at some point, something changes. Because decency doesn’t disappear. It can’t. Decency is innate in our being – rage is actually made of much flimsier stuff — it burns hot, it burns out. Decency remains. Having been a hospice worker, alone with people at their death, I can tell you that at the very end, decency is what remains.

So the protestors will get beat up. The beat-uppers will explain why. They will quote laws and permits and contracts. They will beat them up again. And then one day, you go to church and you hear a sermon on turning the other cheek. On how we should not attach to material things. Or you are alone with someone you love who is dying and her last words are not “Screw those hippies” but “The only thing that matters is love.” Or you glance at your fist after you’ve just connected with a cheekbone and there’s a cut and the guy you hit says, let me help you with that. Or you just stare out of a window during a break at work and see a sunset imbued with more colors than you thought one sunset could hold and you think: oh my, oh my, wait, really now did I think the sum total of my life was what I accomplished? What I owned? You do not know it, but exactly one month and four days from now you will slip on ice and a stranger will rush forward and save you from cracking your skull. You will have been saved then by decency, that one time. And that’s all it takes for the walls of the fortress of selfishness to begin to corrode. One moment, one act of decency, wherever it may spring from.

Decency always loses. Decency never does.

And I think this is something that you who oppose OWS miss. The protestors don’t want your wealth or your jobs. They don’t want even the universal health care and the mortgage help – I mean, of course they do, but that’s not why they’re standing in the street outside your window, day after day after day, singing songs to stay warm. And I think you actually know exactly what the protestors are after. And you know that that thing is inside you and ripe for the taking and that is why you fight so hard and would burn down the nation’s economy to warm your third home in the mountains. You can only fear what is separate from you but what if it has never actually been separate?

They want your decency. And sooner or later they will have it.

Continue reading »]]> Hi Everyone — getting close to releasing Still Listening, an E-book about living with deafness and maximizing success with cochlear implants. It will be available on Amazon on Friday, May 4th.

As I’ve said elsewhere, in this book I’ve tried to distill what I’ve learned from deafness and implants in a way that provides instruction and courage for people going through a similar experience or who have a loved one going through a similar experience.

So, listen up. I will be posting a short excerpt every day until the E-book release. Here’s something from the introduction. Enjoy.

Since my first book, The Unheard, A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, about my experiences growing up deaf and going to the Peace Corps, was published in 2007, I have had the opportunity to lecture around the country to many organizations and institutions, including dozens of agencies for the deaf and hard of hearing.  Schools, camps, universities, state, county and national organizations; a book club in a small living room perched vertiginously over the East River in Manhattan, an early morning speech in a drafty exhibit hall in rural Massachusetts that had clearly just housed a livestock fair.  At these events I had the opportunity to talk to thousands of people about their own perspectives on deafness. 

Some actually had never met a deaf person before me but came to the event because they liked the poster and were curious.   “What does my voice sound like?” they’d ask.  Some felt to use any kind of technological assistance to hear was to negate the glory that came with the full acceptance of one’s being.  Some had a child or two or three with hearing loss, young children, wrestling around strollers and ankles, and felt overwhelmed with guilt.  Guilt, I asked them?  Yes, they said: I can hear, my child can’t…how much will they suffer because of it?  Can they forgive me?  What have I done wrong? 

Some are determined, some are defeated, some are thankful, some are bitter. 

Listen, I told all of them, and this, right here at the very beginning of this e-book (which apparently may not be the way to properly structure it) is the thing I most wish you to take from it: there is nothing wrong.  I’m going to bold that.  There is nothing wrong.  Large font: There is nothing wrong.  Happiness, be it yours or your children’s, does not depend on volume.  It does not have a decibel trigger.  If it did, shouldn’t rock stars be living in constant bliss?  Instead, most live with constant tinnitus, brutal hangovers, and deeply-ingrained embarrassingly adolescent behavior patterns.  So first off, before you use this book to begin to help your deaf child (or spouse or sibling or own self) please accept that in the deepest, most profound sense possible, absolutely nothing is wrong.

Continue reading »]]> Thought will roam on this way and that, detailing how things are, how they could be, how they should be, where you are falling short, where you are rising aboveey decisions that were made incorrectly. It moves like a waterbug flitting across the surface of a pond. It can’t stop; it’s in its very nature to always be moving, rushing from one promise to the next, one hope to the next.

Meanwhile the pond is quiet and still.

Continue reading »]]> Hi Everyone! Welcome to Josh’s brand new Still Listening website!

What is Still Listening?

In a nutshell: understanding how one learns to hear helps to understand how one learns in general and even more broadly, how one interacts with the world. And because these processes all thrive by having a calm, still center, they can foster deep gratitude, self-acceptance, and reverence for the miracle of being alive.

So Still Listening is about nourishing that center. Call it Zen and the Art of Stillness in a Noisy World!

Over the coming weeks and months you’ll find lots of new content that explores just what Still Listening is and the many ways to grow and apply it. There will be articles, videos, a twitter feed and facebook page as a well as the Still Listening Store – where you will find wonderful Zen and listening publications and accessories.

The very next post will explain Still Listening in a little more depth – with a link to the new ebook!

In addition to all this, this website has all the content from the old website and links to purchase copies of The Unheard.

So bear with us as we ramp up in the coming weeks. And welcome and have a beautiful day!