On February 14, twelve students from my Life Worth Living seminar boarded a yellow school bus and drove forty-five minutes to Madison, Connecticut. Carving out 7 hours on Valentine’s day, to the dismay of my boyfriend, was the price of taking this course. My friends joked that it’s probably because they assumed those who voluntarily spend their time debating existential dread were single. With five hours of sleep leading to an 8:00 a.m. wakeup, I was groggy and half-convinced I would spend the day pinching myself awake.
At the spiritual retreat center, a circle of black chairs sat in a wide room with windows overlooking the Long Island Sound. Our professor asked us to speak extemporaneously, for seven uninterrupted minutes, in response to the question: Where and how do you hope to engage the world, and why?
Have you ever had someone, even one of your friends, respond uninterrupted for seven minutes to a question as profound as how they want to engage with the world? Sounds excruciating, right?
I was pleasantly surprised. You’d be pleasantly surprised at how pleasantly surprised you will always be upon getting to know someone better. Every human being is a bottomless well—but surprisingly quick to overflow when someone lowers a bucket. We are astonishingly responsive to uninterrupted attention.
Within those seven minutes, I learned more about the way these strangers articulate their introspection than that of many friends. We were taken into hospital rooms, into tense kitchen tables, into youth group basements and late-night arguments. The circle of black chairs felt exposed, knees angled toward one another. I felt almost intrusive witnessing each person reveal the scaffolding under their carefully architectured seminar facades.
I had assumed, perhaps unfairly, that many of us would frame our engagement with the world in terms of careers or institutional ambition. After all, we go to Yale. But the language that surfaced was largely intangible. Many described their approaches to interactions with strangers, loved ones, and particular things in their lives. One classmate reframed the question entirely: not How do I change the world? butHow do I change the worlds of other people? This semantic shift required the confrontation of the intimate, relational ways that are required for one to “engage” with the world.
Some spoke of relationships with their siblings, which made them realize how a single life holds the potential to veer toward entirely different extremes. I thought of my younger brother. We are close, but I thought about how easily that could have been otherwise, and how radically both of us would have been changed by a different relationship. That awareness makes you acutely aware of the fragility of human becoming.
I want to share three lessons I learned from listening to my classmates.
First, treat people as who they could be, not as who they are. The way we approach someone expands or contracts their sense of possibility. If I approach you as fixed—annoying, difficult, misguided—I freeze you in that frame. If I approach you as your potential, I leave room for expansion.
Second, speak to the inner child. One classmate described seeing every person as their inner child within them asking, Who loves me? A future CEO, future professor, a sibling: all are individuals animated by the same longing to live a happy life, to minimize suffering, to matter. Seeing others through that lens equalizes us.
Third, inwardly ask, why are we the way we are? We are the accumulated weight of our experiences. Even in moments of ideological tension or religious difference, curiosity can replace reflexive frustration.
Earlier this semester, a Buddhist monk visited as a guest speaker and asked us, Have you ever considered how your lunch in the dining hall is made possible? Each meal is the product of farmers, truck drivers, and hospitality workers. Even the Long Island Sound we overlooked that afternoon exists through vast webs of labor, regulation, and care.
If the world is already this intricately entangled, what kind of attention does it require of us? How much effort do we devote to understanding the mysteries of society’s intangible patterns before attempting to disrupt them? And what amount of world-changing is worth diminished presence with the people we love?
For all the vulnerability entrusted to that circle, my own contributions felt trivial.
At the end of the retreat, we were asked one final question: What from your history has shaped the way you choose to engage the world? When my turn came, I cried through my seven minutes, overwhelmed by naming and recognizing the reliance through which I had been shaped.
I left with the humbling recognition that I was not the most perceptive person in the room. But, if I could not be the most perceptive, perhaps I could be the most attentive. Education, one classmate said, means learning to listen and to see, and to practice that in many places. I took this to heart. Curiosity, too, became newly moral. If something feels boring, perhaps I am not approaching it properly.
If I understood how to install the windowpanes in that retreat center overlooking the Sound—how the glass is cut and steadied against wind, how the grout binds to stone, how the electrical lines thread through the walls—how much more fascinating the space might feel. Perhaps people are no different. The better we understand the scaffolding that holds them together, the less interchangeable they become.
