“Friendships and conversations are the way we build capacity,” says “Roving Listener” and Common Good Collective muse DeAmon Harges in the video highlighted below. It is easy not to notice this. The totalizing economy wants you to believe that bigger and quicker and louder is better, that you need more people and more money and more land to build even more capacity. And if you believe that, you’ll never have enough “capacity,” which is a notoriously slippery word used by consultants rather than neighbors anyway.
And then you walk through a holiday in a pandemic, and where there might have been a crowded house there is a sparse table, with perhaps just one friend. And a few hours later, you have been called back into yourself by the power of listening and of being heard, while you were speaking in your soft voice.