Patience with other people is one of three distinct types that researchers have identified, and it is the one with the strongest measured connection to relationship quality. It is also the hardest, not because people are more inherently frustrating than circumstances, but because this kind of patience requires something that waiting in traffic does not: … Read more
The first thing I learned, and the one that took me the longest to actually absorb, was that dying people are not extraordinary. They are ordinary people who have run out of the ordinary reasons to pretend that the ordinary things are not what matters. Twenty years of sitting with people at the end of … Read more
The longest conversations I ever had with people about a single event in their lives were almost never about something they had done. They were about something done to them, kept alive through years of retelling until the retelling started to look less like memory and more like residence. Knowing how to stop holding grudges … Read more
Some of the loneliest people I sat with over two decades of chaplaincy work were also the most capable, and that was not a coincidence. Knowing how to ask for help is harder than it sounds, not because people lack the words for it, but because the request itself feels like admitting something they have … Read more
Most advice on how to be a better listener focuses on technique: maintain eye contact, paraphrase what was said, nod at the right moments. These things are not wrong. But they do not get at what makes someone genuinely good to talk to, which is harder to describe and less comfortable to examine. This piece … Read more
Most people trying to forgive someone who hurt them are blocked by a version of forgiveness that has nothing to do with what forgiveness actually requires. They think it means accepting that what happened was okay, releasing the other person from accountability, or agreeing to repair what was broken. None of that is true. What … Read more