{"id":4382,"date":"2017-11-20T13:11:45","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T17:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=4382"},"modified":"2017-11-20T13:13:43","modified_gmt":"2017-11-20T17:13:43","slug":"life-stories-97-andrew-forsthoefel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2017\/11\/20\/life-stories-97-andrew-forsthoefel\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Stories #97: Andrew Forsthoefel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Life<\/a><\/p>\n

As I was talking with Andrew Forsthoefel<\/a> in the spring of 2017 about his 4,000-mile walk across the United States, which he writes about in Walking to Listen<\/i><\/a>, I asked a kidding-but-not-kidding question: “So, what were you walking away from<\/i>?” Because you don’t set off on foot to talk to random strangers unless there’s something you don’t want to deal with at home—but, as Andrew explains, the journey actually forced<\/i> him to confront everything he’d been dealing with since his parents’ divorce a few years earlier.<\/p>\n

And while he did talk to people that he met along the way, I realized that for the vast majority of his journey, he was out there alone with his own thoughts; as I told him, he could just as easily have gone up to the top of a mountain to meditate, but instead he chose to put one foot in front of the other. He agreed:<\/p>\n

\n

“It was a long, drawn out, movement-based confrontation with myself, which is what happens in the caves, in solitude, on top of the mountain. It was a similar experience. And the punctuations that you mentioned of the people I got to meet along the way… the people had a way of enhancing all the inner exploration I was having.<\/p>\n

So I would do all this inner exploration on the road alone, and then I would meet someone at the end of the day. And I would be able to ask them authentically, sincerely, a question I had about my own exploration, and their experience of it. If I had spent the day dealing with sadness, I might meet someone at the end of the day, and get to talk with them, and the conversation might lead toward sadness, and I could hear about how they navigated that kind of thing.<\/p>\n

And I came to realize that each person was a unique wellspring of information, of experiential information. And I could lean into that [wellspring], and drink from it, and we could share in that together.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Listening to this conversation again a few months later, I was struck by Andrew’s thoughtful determination to really listen<\/i> to others—to meet them with the full force of his empathy, even when (as we discuss) what they’re telling him is rooted in prejudice and hate. In a political climate where pundits make a lot of noise about “listening” to “forgotten” Americans, Andrew’s story offers a model for genuine conversation.<\/p>\n

Listen to Life Stories<\/i> #97: Andrew Forsthoefel<\/a> (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories<\/i> in iTunes<\/a>, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (If you’re already an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)<\/font><\/p>\n

photo: Luke Forsthoefel<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I was talking with Andrew Forsthoefel<\/a> in the spring of 2017 about his 4,000-mile walk across the United States, which he writes about in Walking to Listen<\/i><\/a>, I asked a kidding-but-not-kidding question: “So, what were you walking away from<\/i>?” Because you don’t set off on foot to talk to random strangers unless there’s something you don’t want to deal with at home—but, as Andrew explains, the journey actually forced<\/i> him to confront everything he’d been dealing with since his parents’ divorce a few years earlier. And while he did talk to people that he met along the way, I realized that for the vast majority of his journey, he was out there alone with his own thoughts; as I told him, he could just as easily have gone up to the top of a mountain to meditate, but instead he chose to put one foot in front of the other. <\/p>\n

Listening to this conversation again a few months later, I was struck by Andrew’s thoughtful determination to really listen<\/i> to others—to meet them with the full force of his empathy, even when (as we discuss) what they’re telling him is rooted in prejudice and hate. In a political climate where pundits make a lot of noise about “listening” to “forgotten” Americans, Andrew’s story offers a model for genuine conversation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[272],"tags":[1071,132,305,1072],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4382"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4382"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4387,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4382\/revisions\/4387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}