Project Vision 21

I recently overheard a woman recounting how, after talking for several hours with two other women she barely knew, the three of them became friends. The reason, she said, is surprisingly simple: each listened to the others without interruption or changing the subject.

During the conversation, they sometimes laughed, sometimes talked, and there were even moments of tears and confessions. On more than one occasion, no one said anything. That silence didn't mean the conversation had ended. Nor did the need arise to fill it with words. They simply remained silent.

According to the woman, there were no screens involved during that entire time. No one looked at their phone while another was talking. No one momentarily disappeared behind a notification, a message, a photograph, or a conversation happening elsewhere. During those hours, the three of them remained there.

Thinking about that story reminded me of an ancient Greek word: megalopsychia , which is often translated as "greatness of soul." Aristotle speaks of the megalopsychos , the person who considers themselves worthy of great things and truly is. Opposite them are both vanity and mikropsychia , smallness of soul.

Naturally, it wouldn't make sense to simply transfer a philosophical category from ancient Greece to a conversation between three women in the 21st century. But perhaps we can use it to ask a question: What does it mean today to have a "great soul"?

We might immediately think of grand aspirations, power, prestige, money, or recognition. However, a person can possess all these things and still live permanently closed off within themselves; in other words, it's possible to have an enormous ego and a small soul.

Apuleius (writer and philosopher, 2nd century) linked the good life to an ordered soul that became less and less dependent on external things. The greatness of the soul, then, consisted not simply in accumulating more, but also in needing less in order to be fully oneself.

In other words, perhaps the smallness of the soul does not consist only in aspiring to little, but in not having inner space for anything other than oneself, thus rethinking how many of our opinions, worries, stories, wounds, answers, needs and reactions are really our own.

From that perspective, the conversation of those three women suggests, then, that a person can be "big" enough (metaphorically speaking) to make room for another.

That's what it means to listen deeply: to allow someone to finish a story without rushing them, to give an emotion the time it needs, and to allow an incomplete idea to develop before being judged. Sometimes it also means not responding. Perhaps that's why the silence of those women is so important.

It wasn't about empathy understood as immediately stating, "I know exactly how you feel," but about allowing the other person's experience to truly remain their own, without immediately turning it into a story about ourselves, even if it resonated with us. That skill develops over time.

Perhaps a “great soul” is one who offers presence, hospitality, and friendship even in the troubled 21st century.