The Art of Becoming Acquainted with Someone

Because it is an art. Increasingly a lost art.

We typically first arrive in people’s lives on tracks laid by our parents, not really aware that we are embarking on journeys in the exploration of other explorers’ worlds. As a result, we learn very little of those worlds, be they revealed or cloistered and end up departing back home with little more than a superficial understanding of the people we’ve encountered.

If on the ride back we’re invited to unpack our impressions, I would venture to say that few of us are taught to search past or follow these loose threads. And as our guides themselves may have never learned to do so, little in the way of context is shared to allow you to understand how the lint you’ve come away with fits within the larger fabric. So it remains lint.

And so it goes on, you with your children. And unless you figure out in advance of procreating how to travel in and out of people’s lives and make meaningful connections, your spawn will just go about collecting lint with you unless one of them breaks the cycle.

With the pace of life continuously accelerating, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult for one to figure it out and break the cycle. My generation flew in and out of relationships. I now see my son teleporting from one to the other and I can hardly imagine the kinds of relationships his kids will have.

A friend of mine and I were spending a month in Siena long, long ago in a galaxy far away. He had spent a semester there during college and knew some locals. The Palio was a week away and so we were both invited by a friend of his to his Contrada‘s dinner. I was also invited by his friend, separately, to have a coffee a day or so before the dinner.

The point of this gesture was for us to get to know each other a bit before the dinner to make me feel more comfortable and to get all the basic-first-time-meeting stuff out of the way so that we wouldn’t have to waste time on it en groupe. To me, that was some evolved shit.

Sure today you can google someone but that’s not the point. It’s not about knowing things about the other person. It’s about connecting with that person or at least making the effort.

Now to truly connect with another person, both people have to be heard by the other and accepted without judgment. To get to that point each has to get a sense of the other person’s moral character and generosity of spirit. This sometimes happens with an uncanny immediacy, through a shared experience or the passage of time. In all cases you always run the risk of being disappointed.

And that’s why you need to cultivate the art of becoming acquainted – to make having gotten to that point worthwhile.

NB – it’s the art and not the decor of making someone’s acquaintance. I just spent an evening in the company of people caught up in the decor, it’s unpleasant. The condicio sine qua non of a meaningful connection is authenticity. It must spring from a true desire to love, not be loved….that’s the outcome.