A willingness to share a little of our own story during the conversation helps establish common ground. In a sense, we end where we began. As we share our stories over time, hopefully both of us are enriched as we walk together on life's journey. At best, we enhance one another's story, perhaps bringing hope, lending help or giving encouragement. Our own story is enhanced by others sharing their experiences, revealing their humanness or demonstrating their courage.
Every encounter is an element of the larger whole.
Every encounter presents opportunities to listen with compassion, to share our journeys with one another, and to weave life's joys and sorrows into the rich fabric of our story. Each of us has a story. Our common human facility for language shapes a world with a basic narrative quality. Like a story, life itself unfolds, emerging out of a past, developing in the present, and moving into the future. We all seek to locate and root ourselves in this drama, assembling a more or less coherent, meaningful sense of ourselves in relationship to others and the world.