Listening as Living Toward the Yet-to-Come

A wondering note on why listening projects a hope for tomorrow

What if listening is the most subtle way we wager on a future? What if every act of listening carries the quiet belief that something more is possible; that the world has not yet finished speaking?

 

To listen is to dwell in the unfinished. It is to meet the present not as a closed container but as a field still shifting, still trembling with what has not yet taken form, what we don’t understand and are able to grasp and contain. Listening holds open the edges of the moment. It asks: What is this? What else might emerge here? What other meaning, what other relation, what other world might be latent in these vibrations?

 

Brandon LaBelle reminds us that listening is a “language of connection,” a way of letting things fit together in ways we cannot fully anticipate. But what does it mean to live in that way? To let ourselves be shaped not only by what we know, but by what we do not yet understand? We do not know tomorrow. Listening suggests that we do not need certainty in order to move; we need receptivity. We do believe in tomorrow. We need enough permeability to let the world alter us.

 

Why does listening project a hope for tomorrow? Perhaps because listening always reaches slightly ahead of itself. It touches the most fragile shapes and invisible beings. It leans into the still-forming, the unspoken and unsayable, the not-yet. In listening, we allow space for futures we cannot name, for truths we have not yet grown into. We enter a mode of being that gently loosens the past – its routines, identities, certainties – to make space for the new companions, voices, and relations that might touch us. Tomorrow that reaches out for us; awaits us. 

 

What if to listen is to trust that tomorrow will bring something of worth; that tomorrow arrives with new potentials and possibilities – that tomorrow is different from today? What if listening is already a form of care for the future? A way of preparing the ground for yet again to listen otherwise and relate anew?

 

In this sense, listening is a hopeful act not because it promises improvement, but because it insists on possibility. It keeps the world open. It keeps us open. It aligns us with the ongoingness of life, with all its unresolved tensions and unrealized potentials. It allows the world to unfold and refold in ways we cannot script. To project today as the model for tomorrow is not to listen. To listen is to live as if tomorrow matters because its matter is different; not in abstraction, but in the concrete willingness to be surprised, moved, transformed by new encounters, practices, and orientations. It is a practice of staying with what is emerging, of asking again and again: What else is here? What else can this become? What else can we become together?

 

And so, listening does not simply hope for tomorrow. Listening makes tomorrow imaginable. It gives tomorrow a place to enter.

 

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LaBelle, Brandon. Poetics of Listening: Inner Life, Social Transformation, Planetary Practices. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. (Page 13)