Faces.

I see them every day, in comings and goings on my bicycle: An old man, folded in a deck chair, looking around in front of an old coffee shop. A woman in the back of a motorcycle, with a piercing stare. A faint smile. A man standing by a cart, ready to be loaded with the day's worth of meat, bread, pickled vegetables that he'd assemble into a hundred nun pan pâtés. The expressions betray their emotions, flickering in and out. There are stories. Lived, and imagined. Taught, and ingrained. Aspirations, yet to be realized. Disappointments, yet to be redeemed.

I used to think that it would be nice to have an ability to burn into memory all these scenes that I witnessed, accurately and completely. For me to sort through, categorize and do something with, at my leisure, some time in the future. Having my memory instantly recall-able, just in case. The technology is inching toward this, already. In some years, we might all have the Glass-like omnipresence, implanted, perhaps, ready to capture everything and every moment around you. 

But then, I realize what a nightmare it will become. If everything we are living through is captured for later review, when are we going to do the reviewing? How much time will we need to process just a day's worth of footages? And what happens to the time you spend looking at things again? Where will we have the lived experience, when everything will be reviewable in a never-ending loop? Some of this is brilliantly imagined and told in The Circle, a novel by Dave Eggers. Heck, some of this, we already live it ourselves. 

And so, I realize our propensity for forgetting as we record, selecting as we experience, is a gift. Without these filters (cameras don't have these filters), the information quickly becomes unmanageable. It will become meaningless.

To tell a story, we have to face the fact that we are necessarily picking out what's interesting to us. Leaving things out that are perhaps more central to their being. This is where listening comes in, to supplement our own limited, filtered-out perception. To tell a good story is to truly co-create with those who are part of the larger story. Because if we are spending time experiencing something that aren't right here and now, it should be richer than something from just one point of view. It should be a shared experience. And it should bring new sights into our lives. 

To listen well, and to record everything. They aren't the same thing. To listen well doesn't necessarily mean listen completely. To listen well, one has to take in a lot more, and process a lot less. To listen well is to have no filter, but also, to selectively listen for feelings, the heart of the story. 

We try and bring more of this practice into our pursuits, be it as a filmmaker, advocate, change-making entrepreneur. At School of Slow Media, everyone is a practitioner of listening, with a conscience, and a heart.