Yesterday (July 18) was World Listening Day, which was established on the birthday of Raymond Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and environmentalist who is seen as the founder of acoustic ecology. Born in 1933, he developed his World Soundscape Project, which laid the fundamental ideas and practices of acoustic ecology in the 1970s.
World Listening Day was established in 2010. To be honest I had not heard of the day or the World Listening Project but it started me off reflecting upon just how critical listening is in all human exchanges and relationships, but especially the case in older person care and support, when both the way in which we listen often changes with age and that the criticality of listening and memory plays such a part in ageing.
I have always been intrigued by listening, both the physical act and the power of the experience. There is a silence that sits between the words we speak. A pause. A breath. A moment of being present. But what has always fascinated me over the years and what I have found myself thinking a lot about is not noise or speech, but about the spaces in between – the almost sacred moments when we truly listen.
Listening is an act we too often underestimate in social care. It is not passive. It is not simply the absence of speaking. Listening is an ethical stance. It is a political declaration. It is a human right. In the cacophony of policy papers and targets, of assessments and checklists, listening often becomes the first casualty of our busyness. Yet it is only by listening that we come close to understanding another.
In social care, listening is the glue that binds us. It is the art of presence. A care worker crouched by a bedside, hearing more in the tremble of a breath than in a thousand words. A manager who pauses long enough to really hear the fear in a family member’s voice. A system that slows down just enough to hear the hopes and hurts of those it serves.
To listen is to love. To listen is to dignify. To listen is to recognise the voice behind the silence, the soul behind the sound.
But listening changes over time, certainly the way I have listened has.
As we grow older, our ways of listening shift. Not just physically, as hearing fades, but emotionally and spiritually. Age does not only soften the body; it often sharpens the spirit. The older we become, the more we learn to hear what is not being said.
In my experience of being with many older people I notice that listening becomes less an action of the ears and that other senses are used much more. Listening happens with the eyes. With touch. With memory. Listening becomes textured with the colours of past pain and joy. It becomes an act of remembrance, of legacy, of presence. But all too often, older voices are filtered out, dismissed, or reduced to whispers in the policy halls.
If a day like World Listening Day means anything it should help us to focus better on the central priority of listening in social care, and also to help us confront the systemic deafness to older age. We must, I think, re-tune our ears to voices shaped by decades of living, by grief and by grace. And that is all the more the case when we consider the role of listening for those living with dementia.
Because when dementia enters the room, listening takes on new hues. The linearity of conversation may dissolve. Time may warp. Words may wander. But the need to be heard remains as fierce and vital as ever.
Listening to someone living with dementia demands that we listen not with our ears, but with our whole selves. We listen through gestures, through repeated phrases, through the cadence of a familiar song or the shape of a gaze. We listen knowing that meaning is not always in the sentence, but in the connection. We listen for the emotion beneath the word. We listen not to fix, but to witness.
If social care is to be truly human, it must become a listening culture. One that places time before task. One that honours silence as much as speech. One that accepts that the people we support are not problems to be solved, but stories to be heard.
We need systems that make space for listening – not just in individual interactions, but structurally. Listening must be embedded in inspections, in commissioning, in care planning, in leadership. For if we do not listen, we do not know. And if we do not know, we cannot care.
But let us be honest in recognising that that aspiration seems a very far distance from the realities of the moment, where we are shamefully increasing the contracting of 15-minute visits which strip people of dignity and compassion and certainly give no space for listening which is surely the most essential component of preventative care and relationship formation.
The whole of the social care system, not just those at the frontline, needs to learn to listen better and to commit to a deeper listening.
In the words of the poet:
‘To Listen”
after the quiet of care
I have sat beside the hush of pain
where words refused to come,
and heard in silence
what speech could never carry.
To listen
is not to wait your turn,
but to offer your breath
as shelter.
It is the soft art
of placing ego
at the foot of another’s need.
Not to fix,
but to witness.
Not to solve,
but to stay.
I have listened with my eyes
when memory was a maze,
when time no longer followed rules,
when a name could not be found –
yet love, somehow, was still recognisable
in the reach of a hand.
I have listened through repetition,
through the rhythms of dementia –
where truth is not in sequence,
but in sincerity.
And each telling
is its own kind of courage.
To listen
is to lay down power.
To hold the weight of another’s moment
without trying to reshape it.
It is a kind of prayer –
not always spoken,
but always heard
if we choose to be present.
So today,
before we speak,
let us listen –
with our ears,
our eyes,
our time,
our hearts.
For in the act of listening
we offer the most human gift of all –
recognition.
Donald Macaskill
