When you’re accompanying someone, you’re in a state of relaxed awareness—attentive and sensitive and unhurried. You’re not leading or directing the other person. You’re just riding alongside as they experience the ebbs and flows of daily life. You’re there to be of help, a faithful presence, open to whatever may come. Your movements are marked not

The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness;

Balfour, Buchan continued, would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and discover in it unexpected possibilities, would probe it and expand it until its author felt he had really made some contribution to human wisdom.

As Montaigne once observed, you can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.

The knowledge that results from your encounter with a wise person is personal and contextual, not a generalization that can be captured in a maxim that can be pinned to a bulletin board.

The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.

Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do. A servant knows more about his master than the master knows about the servant. Someone who is being sat on knows a lot about the sitter—the way he shifts his weight and moves—whereas the sitter may not be aware that the

I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” They are the sort of people you want to linger with at the table after a meal or in chairs outside by the pool, to let things flow, to let the relationship emerge. It’s a great talent—to be someone others consider lingerable.

Other easy introductory questions are things like “That’s a lovely name. How did your parents choose it?”