We Never Listen With Empty Ears I came across an idea from philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer that made me think differently about what it means to truly listen to somebody. His work suggests that we never approach understanding with a completely empty mind because we always bring some history with us. We carry previous conversations, disappointments,
Sometimes I Hear Our History Before I Hear You Read More »
A Thought That Stopped Me I once heard someone say that I could have easily lived a life where I did not make it through some of my hardest moments. I had to think about that for a while. At first, it sounded like poetry, the kind of sentence somebody says when they are trying
The Only Life I Was Here to Remember Read More »
The Conversation Beyond Words The older I get, the more I realize that some of our strongest messages never come out of our mouths. We can say everything is fine while our face tells somebody that nothing is fine at all. We can say we are listening while looking at our telephone, folding our arms,
What Am I Saying When I Am Not Speaking? Read More »
What Do We Mean When We Say It Did Not Work? When we do not get the result we wanted, we often assume that what we tried did not work. A man approaches a woman directly, tells her he is interested, and she turns him down. He walks away saying being direct did not work.
Maybe It Did Work—Just Not the Way I Wanted Read More »
A Sentence That Made Me Think I once heard someone say, “If your identity depends on having somebody beneath you, you were never standing very tall in the first place.” That thought stayed with me. It sounded simple at first, but the longer I sat with it, the deeper it became. Some people can only
If I Need Somebody Beneath Me to Feel Tall Read More »
When Gossip Gets There Before We Do I have come to realize that sometimes we meet people long before we ever shake their hand. Somebody tells us a story about them, and that story gets planted in our mind before we have a chance to form our own opinion. We hear that he is jealous,
Do I Know You, or Do I Know What Somebody Told Me? Read More »
Attraction Has to Begin Somewhere One thing I have learned about relationships is that attraction cannot be forced simply because we want somebody to feel what we feel. We can present ourselves well, start a conversation, show interest, and give another person an opportunity to know us. What we cannot do is manufacture genuine desire
You Cannot Talk Somebody Into Wanting You Read More »
A Word That Made Me Stop and Think Not long ago, I heard a young Black brother talking about his years of training in an old Southern Chinese martial arts tradition, and something he said stayed with me. He explained that when he began training as a child, his teachers did more than show him
The Word We Never Learned Read More »
When Something Inside Us Knows Most of us have had moments when something inside us seemed to know something before we could explain it. We may suddenly feel the need to call somebody, take another road, accept an opportunity, or simply leave something alone. Sometimes that feeling shows up as tightness in the stomach or
The Familiar Voice Within: Learning to Trust What We Know Read More »
Looking for Something Deeper I have come to understand mysticism as the search for something deeper than what we can see with our eyes or touch with our hands. Human beings have been asking the same big questions for thousands of years. Who are we, why are we here, and what are we supposed to
Mysticism and the Wisdom We Carry Within Read More »