Way Back No. 7
One Conversation
Today, one conversation.
Just one.
Phone face down.
In another room,
if it has to be.
Your only job
is to catch yourself
loading your reply,
and put the beam back
on the human in front of you.
You’ll have to do it
a dozen times.
That’s not failing.
That’s a dozen reps.
And at the end,
notice one thing.
How they acted,
by the end of it.
People can’t explain
what presence is.
But they bloom in it,
like they’ve been waiting all week
for someone to actually arrive.
Somebody will feel found today.
You get to be why.
From chapter seven
What usually happens
Loading the reply is the habit of a lifetime, so expect the dozen reps. The rep is the practice.
Watch the other person, though. Somewhere in the middle they lean in, slow down, say something truer than they meant to. That is what presence does to a room of two.
One line to carry
Somebody will feel found today.
If someone came to mind
Some people read this page and think of one person the whole way through.
If that happened, send them back to themselves. It costs them nothing.
The other Ways Back are in their chapters, one per chapter, all of them free. This one is yours whenever you need it.