Don't Interrupt

In the Bible, Satan tests Job by stripping away his wealth, health, and family. Job’s friends come to comfort him and sit silently beside him for seven days. When they finally speak, however, they offer shallow advice. Suffering is always deserved, they say. But God rebukes them: “They have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.”

One meaning of this story is that grief doesn’t need an intervention. Yet when faced with sorrow, we so often rush to fix it: “It will all work out.” “Here’s what you should do.” “I know how you feel.” As if pain were a problem to solve rather than a path to walk.

I used to get irritated by people who interrupt or dominate conversations. Then I realized: they’re actually interrupting themselves! When people struggle to come to the end of a thought, it’s almost always because their inner voices are talking over each other. Now, when I hear people holding forth, I notice the seams in their words, the places where their parts are not letting one another finish, and I actually feel compassion.

I feel compassion because I know that self-interruption always begins with being interrupted by others. Many of us learned early that our feelings or ideas would be dismissed before we could even express them. And as adults, we continue this pattern of interruption: we cut people out of our lives instead of experiencing disappointment; we tear up a draft instead of sitting with discomfort; we act before we even know what we feel.

And so each of us, in our own way, must learn this very simple practice: don’t interrupt. Start by not interrupting others. Then, listen to your own inner parts too. Give each voice and feeling space to be heard. In doing so, you create the conditions for healing, which happens not through solutions, but through stillness.

Lim Siang Jin, “Self-Portrait in Fragments”