We Meet People Halfway Through Their Story

We rarely meet anyone at the beginning of their story. By the time someone enters our life, they have already learned a great deal about how to move through the world. They have learned when to speak and when to stay quiet, whether strangers are likely to be safe, how much of themselves they are comfortable revealing, what family means to them, what happens when things go wrong and what is worth celebrating. We meet the person those experiences have helped shape, usually without knowing very much about the experiences themselves.

I wonder how often that gap between what we can see and what we cannot see affects the way we understand each other. Behaviour is easy to observe. We notice the person who doesn’t make eye contact, the neighbour who rarely stops to talk, the colleague who hangs back from the group or the newcomer who seems reluctant to join in. It is much harder to know what sits behind any of it, yet that doesn’t always stop us from reaching a conclusion.

Behaviour Has a History

Meybell Crista grew up in El Salvador during the civil war. As a child, she learned not to make eye contact with strangers, not to speak to people she didn’t know and not to wander off and make new friends. These weren’t simply family rules or signs of a shy child. In the world she was growing up in, there were circumstances in which those behaviours helped keep her safe.

She came to Australia when she was ten, and as we talked about what it was like to adjust to a country where those particular dangers were no longer present, we began looking at those childhood rules from another angle. If we met someone in Australia who rarely made eye contact, didn’t readily speak to strangers and tended to keep to themselves, what might we assume about them? We might decide they were unfriendly or uninterested. If they had come from another country, perhaps someone might even interpret that distance as an unwillingness to become part of the community.

Meybell began thinking about her parents and how differently they had adapted. She had been young when they came to Australia and felt it had been easier for her to let go of some of that fear. Her parents had spent much longer living in circumstances where caution had a reason behind it, and she could still recognise some of that wariness in them.

There is something uncomfortable in that possibility because most of us have probably interpreted another person’s behaviour without knowing its history. We have to. We cannot know the life story of everyone we encounter. The difficulty comes when an observation quietly becomes a certainty about who that person is.

Curiosity Doesn’t Give Us the Answer

There is another trap here. Once we accept that behaviour can have a history, it would be easy to start inventing histories for people. The quiet person must have been silenced. The guarded person must have been hurt. The person who avoids eye contact must be afraid. It may sound more compassionate, but we still don’t know. We have simply exchanged one assumption for another.

Perhaps curiosity is less about finding the correct explanation and more about becoming comfortable with the fact that we may not have one. There are countless reasons people behave as they do. Culture may be part of it, along with family, personality, experience, circumstances and personal choice. Sometimes there may be no significant story behind a behaviour at all.

That makes curiosity less satisfying than certainty. Certainty allows us to put someone somewhere. Curiosity leaves the category open. It asks us to live for a little longer without deciding that we understand the person in front of us.

Maybe we don’t need to understand someone’s whole story to change the way we encounter them. It may be enough to remember that there is a story we haven’t heard.

We Don’t Only Carry the Difficult Parts

There is another way we can reduce people without meaning to. Once we discover that someone’s history includes war, displacement, loss or hardship, those experiences can become the lens through which we see the whole person.

Meybell’s memories of El Salvador don’t fit comfortably into one description. When I asked what she was grateful for about growing up there, she talked about the way people live life fully. Later, when we spoke about Latin culture, she talked about food, music, dancing, family, celebration and expression. Those things sit alongside the memories of soldiers, hiding and fear. They belong to the same life.

I think we sometimes struggle with that kind of complexity. We understand stories more easily when they have a clear shape, particularly stories involving adversity. Something terrible happened, someone survived it and eventually overcame it. It makes sense to us. Real lives are rarely so cooperative.

A person who leaves a country because life has become unsafe doesn’t necessarily leave behind everything that country gave them. There can be things they are relieved to escape and things they spend the rest of their life carrying proudly. Fear and joy can have the same geographical address. A family can bring with them habits born from danger as well as recipes, humour, music, celebrations and ways of being together that they would never want to lose.

Perhaps that is why knowing one important fact about someone can sometimes make us less curious rather than more. We think we have found the explanation.

Not Every Story Is Ours to Hear

Meybell also spoke about why people in her community can find it difficult to share their stories. There can be a fear of judgement and a concern that vulnerability will be interpreted as weakness. She believes there is value in people telling their stories, but the conversation also made me consider what has to exist before someone feels comfortable doing that.

We talk a great deal about the importance of listening, and listening matters deeply to me. But before a story can be listened to, somebody has to decide that they are willing to tell it. We aren’t entitled to that decision. Nobody owes us the private parts of their life so that we can understand them better.

There is a difference between being curious about someone and expecting access to them. Perhaps our responsibility is not to persuade people to tell us more, but to create the kind of encounter in which they can share as much or as little as they choose. Sometimes that may lead to a deeply personal conversation. Sometimes it won’t, and that doesn’t make the connection less worthwhile.

Sometimes a Meal Is Enough to Begin

That is why this week’s Brew the Change feels so natural to this conversation: share a meal from your culture with someone who’s never experienced it, and tell them the story behind it — why it’s made, who taught you and when it’s shared.

I like that the invitation doesn’t ask anyone to begin with the hardest part of their story. It begins with food. A dish can hold an astonishing amount of someone’s world without requiring them to disclose anything they would rather keep private. There might be a grandmother in a recipe, a childhood memory in a particular smell or a family celebration attached to something that looks quite ordinary on the plate. Or it might simply be something delicious that someone wants you to try.

From there, conversation has somewhere to go. You might ask who taught them to make it, when their family normally eats it or whether everyone makes it the same way. You might discover something about their childhood, their family or the place they came from. You might simply have a good meal together. It doesn’t have to become a profound exchange to matter.

We are always going to meet people halfway through their stories, and most of those stories will remain largely unknown to us. Perhaps the more difficult question is not how we can understand everyone we meet, because we can’t. It is whether we can resist deciding that what we see is all there is to know.

There will always be pages we haven’t read. Curiosity may simply leave room for them.

Watch the episode with Meybell on Youtube