The encounter with the other

How can I meet the other with respect and love? How can I meet with love and respect the parts of myself that awaken in encountering the other?

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At the beginning

It’s a bright Sunday in May. I'm walking through a small Swiss town when a little girl, about three years old, comes up to me, smiles, gives me a dandelion puff, and walks away. That brief but magical encounter was like the opening musical note needed to start singing a song: it was the impulse that convinced me to begin writing this little project…

How can I meet the other with respect and love?
How can I meet with love and respect the parts of myself that awaken in encountering the other?

This is the question that has accompanied me for some time now, but which became the central focus of this gap year I decided to take before starting University. The aim of this project is not to find an answer, although theoretically, one certainly could, but to keep this question alive within me when I meet others and myself, allowing it to act in the physical world, not just as an ideal. 

This question arose this year out of a practical need. I was in Germany working as an au pair, and my role was to care for the daughter of the family I was living with. For the first few weeks, the little girl wouldn’t greet me when she came home from school and didn’t want to spend time with me. This went on for a while, and I began to wonder how I could build communication with her based on respect and love so that she would feel she could trust me. It was four months of working and dialoguing not only with that little girl but also with the part of me that could be described as my inner child, the one who feels inadequate, rejected, who doesn’t recognize her own greatness. Inevitably, I started asking myself how to meet the other with love and respect, and I realized that in order to do so, I needed to nourish that feeling of love even toward myself and the parts of me that need it most.

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