It’s a brutal world out there.
The climate of our country, currently, is a wild, fierce, fiery summer of seemingly eternal proportions. We are burning ourselves, we are burning each other, we are burning the opinions and viewpoints that do not align with our own. The smoke stings our eyes, blisters our throats, constricts our breath. We ball up and try to survive in our corners. We talk and talk and talk and forget that the most important thing we can do, ever, is simply listen.
And in this place of me against you, us against them, human against human, we all lose.
For most of my life, I have been obsessed with stories. Not just the stories I can create while I’m tucked away in my room for a few hours every day or the magnificent stories I can read in the pages of a book. I’m talking about the stories of others.
I have listened to stories with rapt attention as I sat across the room from an interviewee and jotted down notes in a reporter’s notebook. I have listened to stories with nothing in my hands, only a watchful eye and invested heart. And I have listened to stories with a mind reeling to grasp the words I want to say before I’ve even heard the person with whom I’m engaged, more intent on my own story than another.
So, you see, I have work to do as well.
Recently I invited into my home a young teenage girl who has attempted, multiple times, to commit suicide. These attempts were demanded by a dark depression that would not let her go. I listened to her story of loneliness, acute pain, misunderstanding, trauma, misery. Later, after she’d left, I paged through the journals she’d left me with a clipped “I don’t want them anymore. I was going to burn them.” I cried, I raged, I ached for the girl who’d felt so alone and burdensome in her despair that suicide was the only logical conclusion. I held her heart in my hands, gently, willingly. Hopefully. We were connected by our shared humanity. And when I was finished, I understood teenage suicide better.
This is what happens when we sit face to face with someone who is different from us and we listen to their story.
My husband, Ben, engaged in a long and random conversation with a homeless woman not on the streets of our city but on the streets of Austin, Texas, where he and I were attending a business conference. I didn’t talk to her, because their conversation was so animated that I assumed she was one of the other conference attendees, rather than a woman who lived on the streets. I was engaged in my own conversation. But then he bought her lunch and introduced her to me. She gratefully took the food he offered, hugged him, and called him an angel. She is a light to the homeless, she said, because she keeps them on the straight and narrow. And who are we to argue with a purpose like that? Perhaps it is only our place to listen to a broken woman with most of her teeth missing. And when we finish listening, we understand the homeless a little better.
This is what happens when we stand face to face with someone who is different from us and we listen to their story.
When I scroll through social media feeds (though, to confess, I don’t do it often anymore, because it’s too painful) and see the ways we are so glued to our corners that we come out fighting with the least little provocation, when I see how much we assume about people who are different than we are, when I consider the fear that keeps us safe and curled up in our protective shells and insulated opinions rather than boldly listening to the stories of real people, I can clearly see how we have shifted into such a combative place.
We’ve traded individual people for representative groups, and our opinions and assumptions paint them with broad, general strokes. Lazy. Lying. Selfish. Despicable. Making much ado about nothing.
It’s easier to dehumanize people when we assign them to groups. It’s not as easy when we look in the individual’s eyes.
The stories of others can teach us important things: what it means to grow up black in America, what it means to be poor in America, what it’s like being a woman in science or technology or any other field in which pay gaps exist, who the homeless really are, why people commit suicide, why addiction is so hard to overcome. Regardless of what we think and believe about any of these things, the best thing we can do to better understand them is to consider that perhaps we don’t know everything there is to know about these issues and then listen to the people who have lived lives marked by them.
Alfred Lord Tennyson once said, “I am a part of all that I have met,” and if these word are true, if we are, in fact, part of all we meet, then it’s also true that we belong to each other. And if we belong to each other, that means there is no me against you, us against them, human against human.
When my oldest son was younger and had periodic meltdowns during which his legs and arms flailed wildly and he shouted things he didn’t really mean, the best way to calm him down was to wrap our arms around him and whisper, “This is hard. I am here. You are safe.”
Our world is flailing. We are completely polarized from each other, suspicious, defensive, ready for a fight. Who will be the first to cross the bridge, approach the other side, wrap arms around a perceived enemy and whisper, “This is hard. I am here. You are safe. Tell me your story, because I’m ready to listen.”
I hope it will be you. Because it’s hard to hate people when you sit across the table from them.
Have a wonderful, love-filled November.
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