By: Emily Welty. Reflections on Rome: The Experience of Encounter. We arrive in the space, none of us quite sure what to expect. There is a tinge of anxiety that somehow everyone else is better prepared. There is no set of advocacy talking points to achieve, no paper to deliver and get feedback on. We are truly here just to encounter one another , without an agenda. Nothing can be gained or lost by how we engageβat least not in terms of our professional careersβand this dynamic frees us to simply encounter one another.
For me, this is truly about being present to a group of strangers. Although the experience of being in-person with one another is very different from being online, we vaguely recognize one another.
We have affinity if not familiarity. Yet, our initial conversations are not as awkward as we might expect. We begin by comparing our travel experiences, where we have come from, and how the journey unfolded.
As we try to don masks or remove them depending on the changing circumstances inside, outside, eating, listening our conversations naturally turn to our pandemic experiences, how it was in our different homes, how it is now. The global nature of the pandemic means no one is excluded from this universal experience. A continuity between our Zoom conversations and our time in-person was that we pushed each other and ourselves to offer concrete examples rather than theories of how to realize the culture of encounter.
The experience of being together began to take shape as not just the container for these conversations, but as an example of the encounter in practice. We were not just talking about encounter; we were encountering. One of the most powerful parts of our days together was the emergent quality of what was expected from us.
