Leaving a Light On

Listening until listening itself is enough

Photo by Prateek Gautam on Unsplash

The world is a lot right now.

Wherever we turn, the structures and cultures we once trusted are revealing fractures we didn’t expect. Institutions that felt timeless are failing, families are being pulled apart.. The sense that life is relatively predictable and that there is stable ground beneath us has quietly evaporated.

And yet, the many ways of walking in the world are more alike than different. If we look deeply enough into any culture, we tend to find the same underlying principles: each are different expressions of the same human questions. On the surface, those differences can make others appear alien or threatening. But when we sit quietly with another person’s lived experience, that sense of otherness often dissolves into something that has a familiar root.

But listening today is harder than it has been in a long time. The air is thick with anger, fear, and the impulse to strike first, to hurt before we are hurt. Exhaustion makes slowness and patience feel unbearable. And when despair shows up in the people we love, many of us no longer know how to be with it.

And our culture is one deeply attached to solutions. Phrases like “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” have seeped into how we measure qualities like worth, action, and care. When faced with another person’s sorrow, we often feel compelled to fix it, to build them a structure, ladder, or plan that will pull them out of the well they’ve fallen into.

But sometimes what is needed is not rescue. Sometimes what is actually needed is for someone to bring a small light down into the well, to sit with them quietly, and to listen until listening itself is enough. And when it is time to leave, to understand that the other person may not be ready to climb out yet.

We leave the light behind not because we carried them out, but because we trusted them to find their own way when they are ready.

And in the end, what is becoming ever clearer is that:

Values are no longer something we can outsource to institutions or governments. They arise and must be held within each of us, in how we choose to show up for one another when certainty collapses.

Journal Prompt: What would it mean, in one relationship right now, to listen until listening itself is enough?