We Couldn't RiSE Without the FALL

One Stab's reflection on Tristan in Legends of the Fall, “Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness, and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legend,” has haunted me since my senior year of high school. I have wondered ever since whether hearing that voice clearly is enough—or whether wisdom depends upon learning how to listen to it without automatically believing everything it says. It’s remarkable how 1 year can change how you see the world and your place in it. 

This month, I have thought more than usual about listening. Not simply hearing. Listening with intention. There is a difference, and I am beginning to understand that it has less to do with how carefully I hear the first words than with whether I allow the rest of the sentence to arrive.

That has been difficult for me, at times. I love patterns. As a scientist, recognizing a pattern early can be extraordinarily useful — an unexpected result appears, a variable moves, and the mind begins assembling possibilities before all the information has arrived. That curiosity has served me well. But a human conversation is not a fermentation process. Another person's sentence is not a data set I earn extra credit for completing early.

Sometimes I recognize where someone appears to be going and my mind arrives there before their words do. Sometimes I am right. And I am increasingly aware that being right about the ending does not necessarily mean I was present for the sentence.

That realization has been following me through August, and perhaps that is why a few apparently unrelated ideas have started sounding harmonious. Disclosure Day ends with an almost primitive instruction: “Listen.” Arrival makes the requirement more complex — before humanity can determine what another intelligence wants, it must confront how easily interpretation becomes contaminated by assumption.

A signal arrives; different people assign different meanings to it; fear accelerates interpretation. Understanding requires something more difficult than an open ear: an interpretation that remains open.

August Rush pushed the idea further for me. Evan hears relationships where other people hear unrelated noise — wind, traffic, machinery, voices, rhythm. The sounds do not arrive with instructions attached. He pays attention closely enough for pattern to become orientation. Listening becomes a kind of navigation system.

Music offers another way to understand this. In an orchestra, a musician follows the conductor while listening locally to nearby players and across the room to distant instrument families. In a quartet, listening becomes more intimate: four voices breathe, phrase, and respond to subtle shifts. Good listening changes with role, relationship, scale, and conditions — sometimes following, sometimes leading. The discipline is to discern what deserves attention now, and to notice when the music has changed.

Perhaps that is one way to understand the CONNECTiONS in SARi CONNECTiONS — not a promise that every signal has meaning, and certainly not an invitation to manufacture patterns. Instead: pay attention, receive the information, notice relationships, test the interpretation, remain willing to change direction.

That sounds a lot like science. Increasingly, I think it also sounds like empathy.

Another idea entered through Carl Jung and the concept of the anima — which I approach as psychology and metaphor rather than empirical science. One Jungian idea feels particularly relevant: projection. We do not encounter another person with an empty mind. We bring memories, expectations, old injuries, affection, fear — ideas about who the person is and what people like them usually mean. Sometimes an internal image becomes so convincing that we begin responding to it before the actual person has finished revealing themselves.

I find something useful there. Not a path from scientist to empath, and not a ladder toward some imagined enlightenment. Something more practical: the scientist in me does not need to disappear, and neither does the part of me that feels things deeply. Perhaps they need to learn from one another.

The scientist can teach empathy to ask: What did I actually observe? What am I inferring? What evidence might change my interpretation?

And empathy can remind the scientist: this is a person, not merely a pattern. Stay curious. Allow surprise. Let the sentence finish.

Maybe wisdom lives somewhere in that interval — and that interval matters to me right now. There are important conversations in my life. With my father. With my siblings. Most importantly, with Allie. Familiarity itself makes listening harder — the better we know someone, the easier it becomes to believe we already know the next sentence or a familiar response.

Sometimes finishing another person's thought is affectionate — two people arriving at the same idea and laughing because they know one another so well. But familiarity can also become prediction. Prediction can become assumption. And assumption can quietly occupy the space where curiosity used to be.

Listening with intention means protecting that space — not forcing myself to stop recognizing patterns, but noticing the pattern and resisting the urge to close it.

Protecting that space also asks something harder: to distinguish a pattern from a verdict. The familiar definition of insanity — doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result — contains a useful scientific warning. Under repeatable conditions, comparable results should follow, and meaningful differences deserve scrutiny. But people and living systems are not static controls. A person can learn; a relationship can adapt; a system can reorganize. The next attempt may resemble the last without being identical to it. Repetition is information, but it is not always destiny.

Patterns matter; good science does not ignore repetition, and empathy does not require us to ignore harm. But a conflict is not a relationship. A difficult season is not a whole life. Sometimes a situation begins to reverse before we have finished naming what we thought it was.

Pause.

But perhaps I don't understand it yet.

Listen.

The natural world offers another version of the same problem. NOAA reports that El Niño is present and expected to strengthen into the Northern Hemisphere winter, while marine heatwaves are also affecting the Northeast Pacific and are likely to remain a concern off California through the end of the year. Warm water can reorganize ecosystems — prey distributions change, species appear in different places, animals adjust where and how they search for food. But El Niño is an event; climate is the longer record. This year's conditions can matter without being the entire story.

It is tempting to anthropomorphize that — to ask what the whales are telling us. But listening with intention requires more restraint: behavior can contain information without containing intention. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report and the IUCN Red List offer a much larger record than any single summer — changes in range and timing, altered feeding and breeding conditions, climate-related pressure on survival and extinction risk. None of these animals needs to understand climate change to experience changing conditions. Perhaps the collective response is not “Save us” but something simpler: the conditions are changing, some can adjust and some cannot, and the disciplined response is to observe rather than insist on the ending.

The comparison returns me to human listening. A difficult moment is not a permanent identity, just as one warm season is not a climate. Yet repeated patterns are still information. The work is to hold both truths: acknowledge what is happening without pretending that we already know the whole life.

I have been wondering whether things in my own life are beginning to make more sense. After so much transition — career, family, marriage, creative work — I would welcome the feeling of direction returning. The temptation is to search intensely for signs and draw the curve too early. But perhaps August does not require an answer. Perhaps it requires a pause: enough time for more information to arrive before I insist that I know what it means.

The films, the music, the science, and Jung now seem to converge on one caution: notice the inner voice that is already explaining what another person or event means. It may contain useful information. It may also be projection. Then return to what is actually in front of you.

Listening with intention is not waiting politely to respond, silently composing a rebuttal or correctly predicting the final five words. It is recognition without premature conclusion: notice the pattern, hold it gently, and keep receiving information. Allow the possibility that this time is different.

To listen genuinely is to concede that something could still happen in the sentence that I did not predict — that the person speaking might know something I don't, that I may have misunderstood the beginning, that my model may need revision. Good science requires that possibility. So does love.

Perhaps the practice is simply to meet a moment without demanding that it explain itself: listen to the water, the birds, the wind, and the lives around me. Let them be what they are, and let them matter without requiring a message.

19 years after August Rush, 2026 has provided an August Pause — a small interruption between signal and conclusion, instinct and response, recognition and certainty.

I still want to connect things. The goal is not to stop seeing connections, but to become more discerning about the difference between one I have discovered and one I have imposed — to let curiosity survive recognition and empathy survive certainty.

Honoring the whole life means allowing for both continuity and surprise. A pattern deserves acknowledgment. So does the possibility of growth. Respect may live partly in leaving enough room to discover which is happening.

Perhaps things really are beginning to make more sense. I hope they are. But I don't want to rush the answer simply because I am eager to hear one.

There is something appropriate about discovering that in August. Perhaps the counterpart to an August Rush is not standing still. It is an August Pause — long enough to hear what comes next, long enough to acknowledge the pattern without mistaking it for the whole life, long enough to honor the possibility of change, and long enough to allow the whole life to speak.

And this time, not completing another's sentence.