Conversation as a practice of equality

“Conversation demands equality between participants. Indeed, it is one of the most important ways of establishing equality. Its enemies are rhetoric, disputation, jargon and private languages, or despair at not being listened to and not being understood.”

– Theodore Zeldin

To sit in the presence of one another, to open to each others deepest longings, o host the space that makes room for silence and the most earnest murmurs of the heart. To see another as they see you, to pay respect to the story of a human being who sits with you and who is curious about your own.

All this is the greatest practice for restoring our humanity and our relations to one another. And this practice should not be deferred to some future time when the conditions are ripe. To sit in the present act of conversation is to be creating the preferred world now.