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How Do You Get to Know Someone?

I sometimes wonder if we’ve forgotten how to become interested in another human being.

Not attracted.

Not entertained.

Interested.

There was a time when people learned each other through stories.

You knew who your neighbors were.

You knew where they came from, what they did for a living, how many children they had, what they planted in their gardens, what they feared, what they celebrated.

Not because someone handed you a biography.

Because stories unfolded slowly, one conversation at a time.

Today, we know what someone had for lunch before we know what shaped their life.

We know which countries they’ve visited before we know what place they call home.

We know their favorite filters before we know what keeps them awake at night.

We have never had so much information.

Yet I wonder if we’ve ever known so little about one another.

Some people ask questions because that is how they build trust.

Others avoid questions because they fear crossing boundaries.

Some wait to be invited.

Some tell everything before they’ve been asked.

Neither way is inherently wrong.

But somewhere along the way, curiosity itself became suspicious.

Questions became interrogations.

Silence became respect.

Distance became healthy.

Privacy became the safest place to live.

Perhaps those boundaries protect us.

Perhaps they also keep us strangers.

I’ve never asked someone what they had for breakfast because I cared about toast.

I’ve asked because sometimes the answer tells me everything.

“I ate whatever was left on my children’s plates before rushing to work.”

In one sentence, I could see the kitchen.

The noise.

The exhaustion.

The love.

The ordinary life.

I’ve never believed people are made of milestones.

I think they’re made of the small things they never think to mention.

The bird they stopped to watch.

The geese that always gather by the pond.

The strawberries they noticed because they were finally in season.

The breakfast they barely had time to eat.

The story they always tell the same way.

Or almost the same way.

Perhaps that is why I still ask questions.

Not to collect facts.

Not to invade anyone’s privacy.

But because every answer is another thread.

And enough threads, patiently gathered over time, become the fabric of a human being.

Perhaps we haven’t forgotten how to tell stories.

Perhaps we’ve simply stopped paying enough attention to one another for stories to emerge.