One of the greatest aspects of college is the invitation to create community through the intersection of all kinds of identity. We meet people in class, in sports, in orientations, in information sessions; we make community with our roommates, dorm neighbors, faith groups, volunteer groups, cultural clubs, and others that build us up into webs of overlap and connection.
However, amidst all of the craziness and the ever-present pulse of human interaction, we can often lose sight of one of the most powerful and deeply connective exchanges that we can have: the one-on-one.
When I first came to college, the idea of meeting with a person one-on-one terrified me. There’s just too much pressure to be interesting, especially once you spin past the first fifteen minutes of surface level small talk that is normally required for all of the other quick and shallow conversations. You move past the classic “how are you"s, the ever-expected “what’s your major/dorm/year,” and the thrilling “where are you from”s into a void of… well… that’s the trouble, isn’t it?
Because so very often we never allow ourselves to reach this void. That the dangerous part of the way that we so often allow for community to happen. When you are in a group, you can veil yourself among others. You can bounce from person to person, from one surface conversation to the next. You can be distracted, spinning, lifted up off the ground and drifting between people. You listen vaguely, laugh loudly, and forget quickly.
But not in the one-on-one. In the one-on-one, you are grounded. You along with one other person, sitting face-to-face with lattes or boba or silence set quietly on the table before you.
And around this table, you sit, and you wait, and then you fall. You fall beyond the superficial and into that void that we so often avoid. You start to tell stories, to hear stories, to ask better questions, to give sharper answers, to explore what life is to you and how that compares to what life is for them. You remember that the humanity that runs in our veins is not defined by “I’m doing good,” or “I’m hanging in there.”
It’s defined by infinitely more moments and emotions and thoughts that we unfairly allow each other to reduce to pleasantries and platitudes. The one-on-one recognizes the futility of vagueness and of pleasantry and opens up an expanse of time and space and connection too vast for platitudes to cover.
When I was in high school, we had a priest from Uganda who worked for our school and ministered to the students. He one day explained to me that when he first came to America, he was very thrown off by the fact that people would ask him, “How are you doing?” and then expect a one-word answer as they breezed by.
He explained to me how in Uganda, this question is meant to open up a prolonged conversation about your health and your house and your wife and your kids and your livelihood. It was meant to engage deeply and keep people accountable to one another.
Though we don’t culturally use this phrase in this capacity, we can learn from it. We can learn to embrace vulnerability with one another, with face-to-face interaction. We can learn to lay our lives out and share them with one other person, and in turn, allow for each other to become fathomless.
