Friday’s almost here, so let’s go ahead and press the release valve on the week, preparing our hearts and minds to relax into the weekend. To do that, let me pass on three things to help you trade your restless energy for inner stillness.

First, I liked (more like loved!) Ludovico Einaudi’s hauntingly beautiful piano piece “Wind Song.” Listen with your eyes closed. And if you’re especially battle-weary from this past week, you might want to take a listen to “Almost June” as well. It’s calming to the frenzied soul.

Second, I liked this video from The Upgrade with Makai Elías Calles on “The Best Journaling Habits for Your Brain, Backed by Neuroscience.” As a lifelong journaler, I found it helpful and have already started implementing some of these practices.

Third, I liked this paragraph from Adam McHugh’s book The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction. In context, he’s elaborating on the importance of understanding our conversation partners as opposed to evaluating them.

Listening for understanding and judging what we hear cannot coexist. If you are spending your energy evaluating and critiquing what the other person says, you do not have the mental space to listen. A listener’s job is not to stand outside of a situation and pronounce a verdict, declaring another person innocent or guilty, right or wrong. The kind of listening that I am advocating for is about entering into another person’s world, getting our feet dirty in the layered soil of their lives. A judge aims to be impartial; a listener is decidedly partial. Listening for understanding means taking the side of the other person, trying to see and think and feel as they do, creatively imagining yourself into their world. You aim to understand their world from the inside. You can tell when you are offering someone a nonjudgmental listening presence because [your conversation partner] will become increasingly open and vulnerable with you (149).

This doesn’t preclude offering counsel or speaking truth. It precludes offering hasty counsel and uttering poorly timed and/or unnecessary words. As McHugh rightly observes, “The most critical element in speaking truth is not content or conviction but timing” (173).

Maybe we should incorporate this petition from the prayer of St. Francis into our prayer time: “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek . . . to be understood, as to understand.”

I wonder what a difference it would make in our conversations?

And while we’re thinking of prayer, perhaps we should ask God to replace our inner franticness with inner calm and our incessant need to talk with a greater desire to listen.

Until next time . . .