Until Our Ears Are Open by Cassandra

Until Our Ears Are Open by Cassandra - February 2014 Scholarship Essay

"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens"- Jimi Hendrix

The average person speaks between 7,000 and 20,000 words a day. There are over 2 Billion indexed webpages at the fingertips of the average internet user. Vehicles bustle, pedestrians hustle, and advertisements blare their messages across 200 foot screens. The cacophony permeates the air and pollutes peace. People are 'civilized', yet the last century perpetuated the most destructive wars since the birth of mankind. The push of a button connects me to someone halfway across the world, multiple countries away, across the Atlantic Sea. Why are we so disconnected?

We hold the most powerful pieces of technology in our hands. With this device, we ignore each other at dinner to let people we are not bodily with know we are eating dinner, and we like it. Our morning jogs are filled with the sweet songs of bluebirds, but we do not hear them past the buds in our ears. Is the morning Talk Show covering the most recent pop star arrest really more beautiful? And we wonder why we feel so lonely while surrounded by so many and so much.

At some point, we forgot how to listen. We hear and speak much, but we do not process. Our minds have compensated for the over-abundance of knowledge and information by limiting how much it now processes. When a person can't filter this excess of stimuli, we call it Attention Deficit. Perhaps they are just able to listen more than others. Jimi Hendrix had it right. Knowledge speaks. It speaks and speaks and speaks. In today's world, it yells and demands attention. In only 140 characters, we can know. But knowledge can't teach understanding. Knowledge can't teach empathy.

Until we slow down and learn to listen to one another again - to put away our devices full of knowledge and connectivity and fully be with the people we are with. Until we learn to hear the bird song, we will continue to feel lonely and disconnected. We need to feel nature, to be one with the sound and life which surrounds us beyond the screen. Until our ears are open, we will remain ignorant to wisdom's power and knowledge's noise.