Where Real Dialogue Starts

I hate to hear people being spoken of as though they were a a familiar or a kind of soft-ware program or device you can touch or handle knowing the kinds of results it may produce. There is always something that makes us alike as humans, something that makes us feel the sense of belonging. But there is something which takes away that sameness of our humanity and makes us, each different from the other. We are each beautiful in the way we are irreducibly unique, in the way we differ.

And aren't we all unique? Aren't we unique in our bliss, different in our fear, alone in our pain, especial in our way of saying and living "LOVE", exceptional in our humanity, glorious in our personhood, fascinating in the mystery of our just being simply human and individual? And isn't it unfair to judge someone as if he were a part of a programmed system whose reactions to things could be easily predictable?

You can never know the measure of another's cross. You can only encourage him/her to bear it to the end. You can never understand the weight of another person's humanness nor the depths of his personhood.  That is why we need to encounter another like an equally fragile and unpredictable being, full of expectations, of fears, of dreams and wounds. If we are often aware of this, then every encounter becomes, not a place where we manipulate others, but a sphere of open dialogue, of sharing, of and exchange of what is really human and sacred in us. We need to unlace our sandals before stepping into the soils of another's individuality. We may be violating or desecrating a thousand sacred things if we are assuming and presumptuous. Openness and welcome become enriching if everything isn't done with the it-has-always-been-like-this mentality, or the they-are-always-this-way attitude or something of the such are like that attitude of mind.

I would like to meet each person as though it were the first time. I would love to meet my wife or my girlfriend, my brother, sister or friend expecting to discover, to enter into a renewed world of mystery. And I believe that is true of everyone. People on a journey. People in the process of growing. People through whom the world reveals itself slowly. And mind you, they are also people who discover who they really are slowly, yes, just too slowly. And what are you to act like you had known them for centuries???