How to Listen to the Whole Thing

Today we’re doing something a little unusual.

We’re going to listen to an entire Norton Street play in one sitting.

The mini-workshop lasts about three hours, and that presents an interesting problem.

How do you stay there for the whole thing?

Not merely remain in the chair. That’s easy enough.

How do you keep your attention there?

Three hours is long enough for something very interesting to happen. At first, you’re listening normally. You’re following the story, noticing the music, recognizing characters, enjoying one version more than another.

Then the machinery begins to wander.

You think about lunch.

You remember something you meant to do.

You start judging the music.

You wonder how much longer this scene will last.

You notice an itch.

You disappear into a thought and return thirty seconds later without the slightest idea what happened while you were gone.

Excellent.

That’s part of the workshop.

The object isn’t to maintain perfect concentration for three hours. Almost nobody can do that.

The object is to notice when you’ve left—and come back.

That’s the exercise.

Don’t Chase the Story

You don’t have to understand everything.

Norton Street is dense. There are ideas, jokes, characters, musical changes, strange references and things that may make sense only much later.

Let them go by.

Trying desperately to understand everything can actually take you away from the experience.

Listen to what is happening now.

A voice.

A phrase.

A rhythm.

A silence.

Then the next thing.

You don’t have to carry the whole play around in your head.

Use the Body as an Anchor

Every so often, without interrupting your listening, notice that you have a body.

Feel your feet.

Feel your hands.

Notice your breathing.

Notice the chair underneath you.

And continue listening.

You’re not trying to relax. You’re not trying to meditate. You’re simply adding one small fact to the experience:

I am here, listening.

That little addition can change everything.

When You Drift, You’ve Found the Exercise

At some point you’ll wake up and realize you haven’t been listening.

Don’t be annoyed.

Don’t try to reconstruct what you missed.

Just come back.

Here I am. Norton Street is still happening.

Then listen again.

You may do this fifty times.

Wonderful.

That means you woke up fifty times.

The moment of discovering that you weren’t present is considerably more interesting than pretending you were present all along.

Let the Three Hours Work on You

Something else happens when you stay with a work for this long.

Ordinary listening tends to be short. A song. A video. A few minutes here, a few minutes there.

Three continuous hours creates a different kind of environment.

After a while, you stop constantly deciding whether you like this bit or that bit. The play becomes the landscape you’re traveling through.

You may become bored.

Then interested.

Then irritated.

Then amused.

Then tired.

Then suddenly extraordinarily attentive.

Watch those changes.

The play is changing, certainly.

But so are you.

And that’s where the experiment gets interesting.

Don’t Demand an Experience

You don’t need visions.

You don’t need a revelation.

You don’t need to feel transformed.

You don’t even have to like the whole thing.

Your job is much simpler:

Stay available.

Listen.

When you disappear, come back.

When you notice yourself judging, notice the judging.

When you become fascinated, notice the fascination.

When you’re bored, see what boredom actually feels like instead of immediately escaping from it.

And once in a while, ask yourself very quietly:

Am I here?

Not as a philosophical question.

Check.

At the End

When the play finishes, don’t immediately decide what happened.

Give yourself a minute.

Look around.

Notice the room.

Notice your body.

Notice your state.

Then ask:

Am I exactly the same person who sat down three hours ago?

Maybe the answer is yes.

Maybe it’s no.

Maybe something happened that you can’t quite name yet.

That’s fine.

The purpose of the Norton Street mini-workshop isn’t to tell you what you’re supposed to experience.

It’s to provide three hours in which you have repeated opportunities to discover something much more fundamental:

where your attention goes, when you disappear, and what happens when you come back.

The play provides the road.

Your job is simply to see how much of the journey you can actually be there for.

 

 

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Here’s the Bardo bus now!

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See You At The Top!!!

gorby