My friend Steve provides a space for people to share their stories; he calls it Time For Yourself With Others.  (Which reminds me, it’s about time we had another one, Steve.)

It’s a simple but brilliant hour, in which someone gets the chance to tell their story to a small group of people, then answering a few questions, and, finally, receives encouragements on postcards from all those who’ve been listening.

In our stories, we are saying, “Find me here.”

Everyone is searching for somewhere they can call home, beyond a building, beyond a town, village or city, and when this home is a listening place, each can tell their story and be supported by those who hear it.

The listening place is where I strain to hear the important things a person’s life is saying to them, the “horizon of possibilities,” as Yuval Noah Harari names it:

‘A ‘horizon of possibilities’ means the entire spectrum of beliefs, practices and experiences that are open before a particular society, given its ecological, technological and cultural limitations.’*

What Harari is seeing for the community, I see for the individual, according to each person’s experiences, talents, passions, curiosities, and relationships.

‘Each society and each individual usually explores only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibilities.’*

Listening places make it possible for us to explore more.  It offers an infinite game of possibilities made more powerful through a time of askesis, that is, confinement, from which our direction and energy emerges – and who knows what this might be?

Because of this, we can say, each person’s life is incomparable and unprecedented.

(*From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)