I and It

Martin Buber was a Jewish philosopher who wrote I and Thou in 1923. He described two basic ways of relating to the world. In the I-It way we treat things, and sometimes people, as objects to be used, measured and sorted.

In the I-Thou way we meet another as a whole presence, without turning them into a list of traits. Such meetings are brief and cannot be forced. Buber did not condemn the I-It way, since daily life needs it. He warned only that it must not crowd out the other.

A useful check is to ask whether you are dealing with a person or with a role, and whether you could, for a moment, put your own purposes aside.

The ticket window

A clerk at a ticket window deals with a hundred travelers a day and sorts them into fares and queues. One afternoon an older man cannot find his glasses, and the clerk stops and looks at him.

She reads the fare table aloud for him and finds the right train. Afterward she thinks that the day’s hundred tickets were a task, but that one minute was a meeting.

Try this today In your next conversation, put the phone away and give the other person your whole attention for five minutes.