We are absolutely amateurs at this matter of building a democratic nation made up of many, many peoples, of many kinds, from many connections and convictions and from many experiences. And to know how, after all the pain that we have caused each other, how to carry on democratic conversation that in a sense invites us to hear each other’s best argu

Listening is about being present, not just about being quiet. I meet others with the life I’ve lived, not just with my questions.

the question is also, how do you listen to yourself?

My only measure of the strength of a question now is in the honesty and eloquence it elicits.

can human beings come to understand their own well-being as linked to that of others, in wider and wider circles, beyond family and tribe?

It references reality at every turn and reveres truth.

I believe that mystery is a common human experience, like being born and falling in love and dying.

we basically come from a post-alcoholic culture. People whose origins are in Northern Europe had only one way of treating distress: with a bottle of alcohol.

Way back already in 1872, Charles Darwin wrote a book about emotions in which he talks about how emotions are expressed in things like heartbreak and gut-wrenching experience. So you feel things in your body. And then it became obvious that, if people are in a constant state of heartbreak and gut-wrench, they do everything to shut down those feelin