Meeting is not uncomfortable, just uncommon. People resist meeting….
Now I get it! People resist meeting. It is or at least seems uncomfortable. It is not our usual way: usual is I-It. We look for experiencing or using. Our vast numbers of festivals are not so much occasions for meeting as for experiencing: It affects me. Yes, within them there are meetings, and perhaps more than in our daily rounds, simply because there are more people there, and new, and we have not yet placed them in classes and categories, so there is a chance for them to break out of I-It into I-Thou. Chance encounters with a crafts vendor who is also a person, an artist, someone with whom you share humanity, becomes a meeting.
Meeting though is not uncomfortable, just uncommon. Which suggests that if we train ourselves to seek it out at every opportunity, this might be the first step to making a more meeting-full world. Once we learn how to do it, we can invite others to do likewise. And in truth, we have already been inviting them along the way.
:- Doug.
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