Loving other people

Yesterday my roommate Brandon (who requested that I link to his blog whenever I mention him by name) got a kick out of one of my previous posts. That was when I realized it had been awhile since I posted about what I’m learning from random situations in everyday life. Here’s a little lesson I’ve been turning over since yesterday…

So I went to this tailgate party with a bunch of other grad students. I only knew a few people there, so it was a nice opportunity to meet other grad students and find out what they were in to. I struck up a conversation with a few different people and got to know them — just getting the basic facts about where they were from, what they studied, etc.

One conversation in particular stands out in my mind, mainly because it was in this conversation that I realized that I wasn’t really listening to what other people were saying. Here’s how the conversation went down (after the introductions):

Me: So what do you study?
Random Guy #1: I came here to study ______ (some field that I’ve never heard of before and can’t remember the name of).
Me: Oh, that’s cool.
RG1: Do you know what ______ is?
Me: No.

And so he went on to explain what it was he was studying, and why he came to Purdue to study it. The thing that bugged me was that my response (“Oh that’s cool”) was completely scripted and I wasn’t really listening to what he said. Sure, I was paying attention, but to be honest it was as if I didn’t truly care what he was studying — it was as if I didn’t care about him.

So I’ve been thinking about what it really means to love others, to truly be interested in them and who they are. I don’t have it figured out, but I do know that it involves more than surface conversations in which I’m only half engaged and half interested in the responses.