The ethics of listening

Things come to be, and what they are is nothing but the way that they move; there is nothing that is that is not subject to change and dissolution. To “rage against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas) is to fail to see that the only way to live is to stay out of the way of what is coming to be, and let it become what it is to be.

If we listen to the stream, rather than trying to dam its flow, we find that we ourselves are no more than fleeting eddies on the bright water, and what is true is what the moment calls out. Then ethics is for us no longer a matter of what is written, but what is heard.

Light is only visible in the shadows; life needs death as up needs down. To see this for itself – see it, rather than working it out – dissolves our bitter grasp on outcomes, and leaves us free to find out the grain in things. To surrender to change – yes, and to decay – is to become free to live inside the pattern of what is necessary, rather than scratching at the surface of facticity.

Strangely, this is in no sense defeatism. Our freedom to act in accordance with what is might just as well involve us as the means of change ourselves: the tyrant’s brittle effort to resist the necessity of change is worn away to sand in the stream, carried down by the flow of what is true, by the slow processes of care and kindness.

To sit still, listening, still enough that the fragility and contingency of all that appears to be becomes clear, like the settling out of sediment in a pond that has been disturbed but is now at rest, is to find our own current in the stream of what is coming to be. If we do, then the smallest moment opens on to the limitless field that is the ground itself. There is nothing to wait for: what is is this.