'Walking to Listen' author Andrew Forsthoefel to share experiences learned while walking Jan. 30
Kim Chaudoin | 615.966.6494 |
Andrew Forsthoefel likes to walk. A lot.
He walks to exercise – but not to strengthen his body. He walks to hone his listening skills.
And as an old Joe South & The Believers tune imparts, Forsthoefel is convinced that figuratively walking in another man’s shoes and practicing the art of listening helps one “get inside each other’s minds” to see life through another person’s eyes to make the world a better place.
Forsthoefel once took a long walk — a 4,000-mile long walk to be exact — just to listen to other people.
On Tuesday, Jan. 30, at 7:30 p.m. Forsthoefel will walk into Collins Alumni Auditorium to share his experiences and to share stories from that journey that are compiled into his book, Walking to Listen. The conversation is free and open to the public. His talk will explore what happens when one listens to others and the impact that can have on relationships and communities.
Sponsored by Lipscomb’s LIGHT: Illuminating Cultural Engagement program, the event will feature Forsthoefel sharing what he learned about active listening, mindfulness and unity among other lessons as he met people from “all walks of life” during his walk across America as a young college graduate.
Earlier in the day, Forsthoefel will facilitate an exploration of listening in a workshop and walk for students, faculty and staff. Using a combination of storytelling, discussion, group exercises and an exploratory listening walk, he will lead participants on a journey to understand how active listening plays a role in building relationships and communities.
During the afternoon session, Forsthoefel will share advice for incorporating active listening into their everyday lives. As part of the walk, Forsthoefel, along with representatives of the LIGHT program, will take students along Nashville’s Nolensville Road, using Plaza Mariachi as a beginning and end point, to help participants take their own version of a listening walk. Participants will talk to those along the way who are willing to talk to them and encourage those people to share their stories.
“The goal is to expand our bubbles, to learn more about other people and where they come from. In deeply listening to others, our students will enter a state of vulnerability and uncertainty that will help them expand their worldviews and be better and more caring neighbors,” says Cori Mathis, assistant director of the LIGHT program. “As part of Lipscomb's mission, we hope this will help students in their spiritual walks, as well.”
The afternoon walk and workshop event is free for Lipscomb students, faculty and staff. To register for the afternoon workshop and walk, contact Mathis at cemathis [at] lipscomb.edu.
An author, speaker and peace activist, Forsthoefel lives in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. At 23, he headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of poetry by Walt Whitman and Ranier Maria Rilke and a sign that read “Walking to Listen.” He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but said he didn’t know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide.
In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He said he met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt. But he also encountered incredible kindness from strangers. Thousands shared their stories with him, sometimes confiding their prejudices, too. Often he said he didn’t know how to respond. Some of the questions he faced were “How can we find unity in diversity?” and “How can we stay connected, even as fear works to tear us apart?” He said he listened for answers to these questions, and to the existential questions every human must face, and began to find that the answer might be in listening itself.
“Humans have a kind of connection, based on vulnerability and built by listening, that is not only the great gift available to us as humans, but it is also our obligation and our work,” Forsthoefel writes on his website livingtolisten.com. “My work is intended to catalyze this connection. I do it to spark an unlikely unity in our diversity, and to challenge that which would separate us from each other and from ourselves. My intention is that listeners, readers, and participants find something useful in my work for their own sovereign journeys: a tool, or some nourishment, maybe even medicine.”
“I wouldn’t be doing this work if I thought the human spectacle was an inevitable, irreparable disaster. I believe in us, in our resilience, in our goodness. I’m motivated by the conviction that there is a way to be human together, right here and now, without succumbing to the greed, hatred, and delusion that have been motivating humans for ages. There is a way to be here such that our lives are themselves transformative offerings of peace,” he continues.
“I’ve seen it done: remarkable human beings living love in the course of their own unremarkable days, walking the path of wisdom toward a world in which the practice of peace hasn’t been forgotten or passed off as someone else’s responsibility. A world in which we all bear the burden and privilege of prioritizing peace, now, in our own minds and with each other. We can live in that world, in love, but we will have to walk there, and we can’t do it alone. We must travel together, all of us.”
LIGHT: Illuminating Cultural Engagement was developed as a quality enhancement plan (QEP) to enhance student learning. The purpose of the program is to lead students to a lifetime of collaborative engagement with the world’s cultures, to guide students to develop respectful attentiveness to diversity and to awaken students to a responsive awareness of neighboring as a moral imperative.
The goals of LIGHT are increased understanding of various cultural practices, systems and institutional structures; improved student ability to explore various cultural practices, systems and institutional structures in relation to their own; and expanded engagement with diverse communities locally, interculturally and globally.