A young man bought me a cup of coffee last week. He wanted some career advice, and I never turn down an opportunity to deliver wisdom over a free coffee. So I let him pay for the coffee, we found a place to sit, and I did my part: I delivered wisdom for about 45 minutes. About show business, about Princeton Theological Seminary, about the many lessons I’ve learned and the many mistakes I’ve made, and the many opinions I hold on a wide variety of subjects. I was, in short, magnificent.
It was only when I was pulling on my coat and glancing at my phone that I realized he hadn’t really asked me for any specific career advice. He had let me hold forth, and every now and then, in hesitations and half-started sentences, he circled around other things. What I suddenly realized, as I was dashing off to my next appointment, was the real questions he had. But those questions never quite got asked. They were harder, I guess, to come right out and say. Too heavy, perhaps, to interrupt me while I was on a roll. So by the time I had stopped being witty and wise, he was just warming up to the true reason he wanted my advice.
Walking away from the coffee shop, I was suddenly struck with some career questions of my own. I am, among other things, studying to be a priest, which means I really should have known how to navigate that conversation. I really should have known, in other words, how to zip it. As it turns out, that’s a crucial skill for everyone, even people who have been asked, as I was, to talk. Aspiring clergy get all sorts of training in preaching and public speaking, but maybe what they really need — well, what I really need — is a class on how to shut up and listen.
I heard a lecture once by a doctor who had left medicine to become a hospital chaplain. He said the hardest thing he had to learn in his new vocation wasn’t theology, prayer, or how to sit with the dying. It was how to stop talking. To let people say what they needed to say, or not say it, without jumping in with a fix or an explanation or, the worst possible choice, advice.
“Just be there,” he said. “Just bear witness.”
We think we should be doing something harder and more complicated. But just being present for someone in pain, he said, without taking over, is a lot harder for some people (like me) than it sounds. Maybe if there had been more silence in that coffee shop, my young friend would have filled it with his real questions.
A woman I know told me a story about a friend of hers who had lost a child in a car crash. When something that terrible happens, the instinct is to reach out and say, “Is there anything I can do?” But the person experiencing that kind of grief is in no shape to answer that question. They can barely answer the phone. So instead of asking, this woman sent a text. It said, “Tomorrow morning, after I drop my kids off at school, I’m going to drive to your house and park in front. I have my coffee and my laptop, so don’t worry about me. You don’t have to come out or say hello or do anything at all. I just want you to know that I’m there.”
What an extraordinary thing. Not a question. Not an offer that requires a response. The chaplain called it bearing witness. The woman in the driveway called it just being there. I’m going to call it something slightly less polite, because I think that’s the only way I’m going to remember it. I’m going to call it “please shut up,” but with the word “the” and a familiar Anglo-Saxon vulgarism stuck in there, between “shut the” and “up.” Just to make sure it sticks.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
