CHAPTER 01 / 03
The sentence we cannot hear
Someone sits silently across from us. At first we think they are tired. Then we think they are hurt by something we have done. Soon, before they have opened their mouth, we have finished the whole conversation on their behalf. The tea grows cold; the distance between us grows. Perhaps they have simply had a difficult day. Perhaps they are looking for a little room in our expression for what they need to say.
In Ghazali’s thought, examining our inner life begins the path towards knowing God. Reading the chapter on self-knowledge in The Alchemy of Happiness, I pause over his attention to the ways anger and desire can govern us.[1] The question that stays with me is this: while trying to understand another person, can I hear what, within me, is interfering with their voice?
Sometimes beneath our hurt is a wish to be seen. Sometimes it is the fear of losing someone we love. Neither is easy to admit. As though acknowledging our fear would diminish us, we raise our voice a little. The person before us begins to defend themselves instead of telling us what is wrong.
CHAPTER 02 / 03
Between the things we know
We know someone’s favourite food, what makes them laugh, which season leaves them feeling cold. Years gather these small pieces of knowledge. Yet one evening we may still fail to understand why their eyes fill with tears. Intimacy cannot mean knowing a person once and leaving them there. They change, just as we do.
Reading Fuzuli’s verse that brings love and learning together, I think about what I do with what I know.[2] For me, its bearing on life today is not to put knowledge aside. It is to notice whether what I know about the person I love prevents me from listening to them. When I say that I know someone, do I mostly know the version of them that has grown accustomed to me?
I think love sometimes takes an undramatic form: listening without preparing a reply. Not immediately turning someone’s story into something that happened to us. Staying beside their sadness for a while without rushing to repair it. We cannot always manage this. Noticing that we have failed can also find a place within intimacy.
CHAPTER 03 / 03
A little room
People do not always leave when they feel misunderstood. Sometimes they tell us less. They leave out a detail, swallow a sentence, say they are fine. Life carries on in the same home, but certain doors quietly close. It may not have been a great argument that closed them. It may have been feeling a little more alone each time they tried to speak.
Perhaps finding our way back needs no grand declaration. A phone set down on the table, a sentence allowed to reach its end, a voice that forgets for one evening about being right. These things may not undo every hurt. Still, they may help someone feel that what they have to say can reach another person.
Ghazali’s inward attention and Fuzuli’s love sit, for me, on opposite sides of the same table. One invites me to hear my own voice; the other to lower it a little. This is where thinking with them has brought me: an intimacy I need to learn again each day.
When did we last listen to someone we love while forgetting, for a moment, what we already know about them?