My Simple Stories

Like most of other primitive cultures, the early culture of the philippines performed as the activities of daily living with with an awareness of their  world being governed by forces beyond their central life but if properly “approached” could be influenced to inspire art on man’s behalf. In all of his activities, the Filipino invited these forces to extend themselves into his daily living. Dance for him was a form of worship, convocation with the unseen powers by which he lived. His dancing was full of images of this immediate world: the wind and the rain, the passing of seasons, movements of birds and animals, rites of fertility, courtship, birth, death, hunting, harvesting, praying for success, and celebrating of victory.

Gestures used in story telling were developed to the point that feeling the story became a full scale, man took another step in pushing the dance from the realm of the Filipino ritual to the world of art. At the time when the esteemed explorers came, dance as a social function had already started to blossom in the Philippines.

Whether it is to lead or succeed, life demands that we stretch ourselves to learn, and actively to come to understand what others feel and perceive, beneath the surface, beneath the words. Many sales and leadership programmes hold aloft the phrase ‘active listening’, telling us that this is the key to winning friends and influencing people. That’s sensible, of course: listening makes any of us better companion and more effective worker. But I contend that many ‘active listeatrical exercise in appearing like you’re paying attention to another person. The requirements: lean forward, make eye contact, nod, grunt of murmur to demonstrate you’re awake and paying attention, and paraphrase something back every thirty seconds or so. As one executive I know wryly observe, many inhabitants of the local zoo could be trained to go through these motions, minus the paraphrasing. What’s missing in all this is the fact that listening is a matter of paying deep, genuine attention, with eyes open and seeing, mind open and learning, heart open and feeling.