This week i was reading a piece on empathy and it had six habits we could try to make ourselves more empathetic. i’m not going to list them but they did make me ruminate on a few things that stood out for me.
A key empathy habit was listening and i think listening is one we all have trouble with because we can’t wait to get our own point across. Most people only half listen the minute something has been said that they want to respond to. Non stop talkers are probably the worst at not listening. Their story is always much more important than yours ever could be and they will interrupt you with no thought for your feelings. They don’t want to listen…they just want to talk. They can't ever be as empathetic as a real listener because they never learned to stop caring about themselves long enough to think about someone else.
But the empathy habit that really called to me was curiosity about strangers.
Apparently curiosity was high on the list for people that were empathetic.
How many of you study other people, wonder about their lives, observe complete strangers with delight, and will even start conversations with someone you have never been introduced to?
My mother used to tell me curiosity killed the cat. She would admonish me to stop asking so many questions and just keep my mouth shut. But over the course of my life the stories i have heard from complete strangers have opened up my life in ways that are hard to explain. It is kind of like riding along on a train, a bus, or in a car and catching a fleeting glance through a window of a person moving through their life. You have just connected with them even though they aren’t aware of it…they came and went in an instant but their aura stays with you for a while and you wonder…or at least i do…who they were…they have no idea they changed your life for that moment. They have no idea you had a fleeting interest in them...but you know and you are different because of it. The stories i hear make me different.
People from all over the world fascinate me…the good and the bad. i guess you could say that i have taken curiosity to a higher level. i cultivate it because i believe that all of us human beings need to live in groups to feel full-filled. We need connection to others, we need face to face encounters, we need to argue and love, we need to cry and laugh and be vulnerable, we need to feel close to really be complete human beings.
When we separate ourselves we suffer loneliness, anger, and even bad health. We need each other, we need social activities, we need connectedness, and curiosity helps us achieve that. Being curious helps us to leave our comfort zones and interact with those we know nothing about. We learn from them, we open up to their worlds and they open up to our own.
Healthy curiosity is not morbid or bad…it is good for you.
See ya next week
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