We may respond quickly or accurately, but without truly listening. Or we may offer “help”, yet remain absent in the relation. Sometimes we speak and answer, but without being in connection because there is another mechanism that kicks in, almost automatically. Function.

We are in function—a state where we instinctively try to keep the interaction flowing.

When we confuse conversation with function

Perhaps we sometimes mistake words for presence, as if answering were the same as listening or as if helping were the same as being there. It’s familiar. I think we’ve all been given quick-fix advice, and also all offered it ourselves. It’s natural, a human reflex. We just want to help or … Is there more to it than that?

Maybe it’s not just about wanting to help. Perhaps what we seek is flow. The flow of conversation feels easier than stepping into what’s heavy, unpredictable, or even complex. Therefore, “help” sometimes lands wide. Advice is given or solutions offered, not because we asked, but because the helper-function activates on its own. Our help tends to seek the general: what one usually does in situations like this. And that’s where conversation can slip away.

When “help” becomes functional without first asking what is actually needed, we risk losing the connection.

And maybe this is where the difference between function and conversation starts to show; as soon as we hear something that sounds like a problem, a mechanism kicks in and we almost instinctively reply:

– “You just need to try …”

– “Have you thought about …”

– “It’ll be fine”.

– “I don’t know, but I’ve heard others do …”

We are quick-fixing so that we may return to the flow of conversation. But in trying to fix, we risk shutting the door to what is truly at stake. Because what the other person said might not have been a request for solutions, but an opening and attempt to let the weight be shared.

Fixing avoids being present

When we go straight to fixing, what happens is that no one risks anything, and no one opens to real presence. Because when we fix, we stay in function. But when we truly listen, we risk being affected; we may feel something stir within us. Maybe that’s what’s at stake here:

entering into conversation also means entering into ourselves.

Could that be why we stay in function rather than in conversation? Because we try to avoid coming into contact with what might also stir us ...

The real conversation may begin when we let go of the urge to solve. When we dare to stay in the uncertainty together, listen to what is actually at stake, and allow the words to form a shared space. Because something else is also present when we move to fix and that is discomfort — the discomfort of risking something and stepping into what is unknown.

Function and conversation follow different rhythms.

The pleasant sense of flow easily lets us confuse conversation with functional exchange. But to “talk” is not the same as truly meeting the other person, to “answer” is not the same as to listen, and to “help” is not necessarily the same as being present.

While function is something we do, conversation is something we are in. In function, we want to move quickly, but in conversation we must endure that it takes time.

Function has goals: to solve, conclude, move on. Conversation has no fixed goal. It allows something to unfold. It does not ask: What should we find out? It asks: What is happening between us, right now? In you, in me … It allows hesitation, silence, not-knowing, and a change of direction. As such, conversation is not efficient, it is alive.

Behind all words, questions, and replies, something else is at stake. It’s the difference between the appearance of conversation and actually being in one. It’s not the number of words or the pace that tells us whether we are in function or in conversation.

It is whether we allow ourselves to be affected, whether we make space for one another, and whether we step out of role and into relation.

Roles or human beings

When we meet in function, we see each other’s roles. We’ve grown so used to the functional space that we forget how it feels to meet as human beings rather than roles. But the moment we let go of “the outcome”, the conversation opens.

Conversation then creates moments between people, where something can shift. But it only works when we’re not trying to achieve something specific, but instead allow something to emerge. When we step out of function and into conversation, something changes, not necessarily what we talk about, but how we are with one another. Suddenly, we are no longer speaking in order to solve, clarify, accomplish, or answer. We are not speaking as parents, advisors, partners, colleagues, teachers or students. We have stepped out of function and into conversation.

Why listening may feel difficult

The workplace indeed has a functional core such as goals, tasks, and efficiency. There isn’t always time to stop and enter into real conversation, so it quickly feels like a disruption. It breaks the flow. And we like flow. Flow is pleasant, it is smooth, quick, and frictionless.
“How are you?” we ask; not always because we want an honest answer, but maybe just to initiate a light, positive exchange. “Good, and you”? “Yeah, good”. The conversation flows and we feel social, without too much being asked of us. That rhythm works in everyday life and it has its place.

We can’t go deep all the time. If we knew the conversation would become complex, we might not ask at all. So yes—flow and fast role-switching are both useful and necessary. But if we never pause the flow to truly listen, then friendships, relationships, and communities quickly start to flatten and we slowly become less able to truly see the other person. That’s not just an individual loss, but a shared loss.

When relations are only functional

When relations become purely functional, we lose the essentials of trust, well-being, and the ability to stand together when things become difficult. The difference becomes clear when conflict, breakdown, or difficult situations arise. If we’ve never learned to be in conversation—but only “in function”—we are left without space to handle what is vulnerable or complex.

If we always choose flow, then relations turn into functional networks instead of living connections.

That doesn’t mean every coffee break should be an existential conversation. But the workplace needs moments of real encounter; moments where the flow is broken, and we are present outside of roles as human beings. Sometimes, a brief glimpse is enough: that a colleague is allowed to say, “this is difficult for me right now”, without anyone immediately shifting into fix-it mode.

Why listening is necessary

As human beings, we have a basic need to be heard and seen, not only when things are simple, but also when they are complex or unresolved. When someone truly listens to us, something is allowed to shift and the weight of what we’re carrying can be shared, just a little. This opens for the possibility that we might come to understand ourselves a little better, because our words are allowed to land in a space that receives them.

Yes, it takes time, and it takes courage, and also patience. But then again—what matters most? That the flow is always maintained or that we, at least sometimes, live in relations where something real can happen …

This is a field note from a classroom in Thailand, but could perhaps be from classrooms more familiar than we’d like to admit.

I recently found myself standing in a schoolyard full of noise and play and minutes later, in a classroom where the silence felt dense, not calm. The contrast between those two spaces created a tension I couldn't ignore.

Inside the classroom, I was met by wooden desk-chair combinations that looked like they hadn’t changed since the 1970s. The contrast to the courtyard was immediate.

Before I took this photo, the room had been full of students.

While I walked past the classrooms in the corridor, I noticed through the open windows how some students sat quietly, while many were on their phones occupied with something. A few stood talking, and the teacher sat in the corner. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Was this participation? Learning? Were they engaged? With what? Or was it something else entirely …

There was something about that contrast I couldn’t let go of. Something between the movement and engagement of students outside the classroom and the stillness inside. It wasn’t a clear problem, but more like a kind of friction. A spatial dissonance I hadn’t expected.

Something about the space felt off, like it was shaping what could or couldn’t happen. It raised questions I hadn’t prepared for about the space itself. About presence. About how learning actually enters a room.

What does learning feel like when the chairs and desks set the tone for notetaking, yet students are still curious.

But curious about what? And what happens when they’re not curious? What if what’s asked of them doesn’t connect?

In many European schools, phones are banned or restricted.

Here, they’re everywhere and easy to blame. But are they the real problem, or is it possible that they are filling a void?

If so, then it becomes relevant to explore what that void contains.
Is it boredom? Disconnection? Or maybe a sense that none of this matters …

Maybe it starts earlier with the desk-chair units that might be space-efficient and easy to line up, but signals lecture delivery and not thinking together. A space that keeps students still!

Maybe the void is not only digital but to a certain degree the space itself.

Could it be that how classrooms are organised, and what they make possible or difficult, has a bigger impact for both teacher and students?

This is not about old furniture versus new tech.

It is about spatial structures that keep students still, while their attention drifts elsewhere—how physical design can restrain bodies, but fail to invite minds.

A still classroom that has stopped asking questions. Or maybe a classroom that no one ever thought to ask something of.

I don’t have the answers. But I want to stay with these questions.
What kind of learning becomes possible when the space itself invites presence, not passivity?

If you’ve ever sat in a classroom that felt like this, I’d be curious to hear.

“Which place left the deepest impression?”

The question sounded open and curious. Like an invitation to share what I had experienced. But there, while still in Ayutthaya, something in me hesitated. The question landed too soon. The impressions hadn’t yet settled. Or rather, they hadn’t yet settled in me.

It wasn’t during the visit that anything settled. Not really. What stayed with me only began to surface once we were already leaving, somewhere between temples and traffic. That’s when impressions started gathering and fragments came together slowly.

The question had been asked with curiosity, yes. But a particular kind of curiosity — one that wanted something in particular. The question closed in on the experience; it asked for takeaway rather than presence and sought to shape the moment into something finished that could be named and placed. A conclusion, before the experience had even settled.

But my answer hadn’t landed. It wasn’t complete, it wasn’t even fully mine yet. Still the question pressed for an outcome. It pulled me back to the place and moment where my experience had unfolded but not yet taken form.

At the Buddha tree

I thought of Wat Mahathat. The famous Buddha head, held gently in the roots of a Bodhi tree. And I remembered how I hadn’t felt anything, or rather, how that was exactly what I had felt. An absence.
It wasn’t reverence or stillness. I wasn’t struck by the quiet force of ruins, though ruins hold something particular. They carry silence, time, and erosion. But here, none of that reached me. What struck me was the lack of presence caused by a disturbance that now claimed the space.

Around the Buddha, there were eyes waiting for the perfect shot. There was a kind of buzz from tourists moving closely, overlapping, and rushing past the scene. I heard voices in different languages, I saw cameras, people stepping in front of each other, in front of me, angling for a picture. The bodhi tree had become a checkpoint; a brief stop for photo documentation.

The moment was fractured and there was no room to linger. No sense of staying, as if the sense of being there had been drowned out by the mental checklist: seen it, done that, move on.
At the bodhi tree, what stood out wasn’t awe — it was noise. I realised that what I was looking for wasn’t happening around me.

A walk through the ruins

I continued walking further into the ruins. One of the narrow paths led between old walls and opened onto a clearing with rows of seated Buddhas. In some, only the torso remained. Others, only the folded legs.
At first I thought they were signs of time’s decay, but they weren’t just remains. The beheaded statues bore witness from the invasion over two hundred years ago, when Ayutthaya was conquered and looted.

But even in the brokenness — perhaps especially there — a presence lingered; I wasn’t just walking through a ruin, but through a stillness that still had something to say. There were no voices, just my own breath, rising and falling in the open space. That was the moment I felt the place. The silence allowed me to take in what remained of a vanished time.

Walking the temple grounds

Later, at Wat Yai Chai Mongkol, the same feeling returned.
In the middle of the temple grounds, the chedi rose and stretched into the sky. Around it stood smaller spires and large seated Buddhas, draped in yellow and warmed in the sun. At its center was the staircase. It was steep and seemed to command reverence even before I had taken the first step. The air was thick with heat. A slow procession of people moved up and down the stairs. From below, I watched as visitors disappeared into the dark entrance at the top, as if being swallowed by a silence waiting behind the old stones.

I made my way up to the top where I stepped through the narrow opening and entered the chedi’s inner chamber which was a bare relic room, aged and unadorned. At its core was a shaft. I came closer and looked down. About five meters down there at the bottom, a mantra had once been found. It was a text written in honour of King Naresuan.
Even with tourists gathered around it, there was a stillness in the air. And yet, I felt nothing. Nothing but the crowding of people moving in and out of the small chamber. Once again, it was the circulation of people that defined the space.

As I left the chamber and went back down, the view opened there on the stairs. I looked out over the grounds below where rows of seated Buddhas lined the far wall, many wrapped in yellow. I had noticed them earlier, but now, from the steps at this height, they appeared more distinctly.
Halfway down the stairs, I paused. There was a flicker of stillness and I looked around. The staircase had cleared if only for a brief moment and only a few figures moved at the foot of the steps. And right there, I felt it again. Just like earlier at Wat Mahathat. It was presence. The chedi no longer stood as background — it had reached me through the ascending and descending of stairs. Through my footsteps, breath, and the shifting view.

Coming down from the stairs, I decided to discover the area around the chedi. Except for a few people that had taken the same route, the open path was empty. Along the wall, the silent Buddhas sat with folded hands and lowered eyes. As I had seen from the stairs, some were wrapped in yellow cloth, while others remained bare in stone. The line of statues seemed to create a rhythm which I followed as I walked quietly from one to the next.

The feeling of presence kept lingering between bricks, statues, trees, and the open sky. It wasn’t wonder or awe. Just a quiet presence that stood still long enough to become visible.

Experiencing something asks something of us.

It asks for presence, not just being there, but remaining inside the experience. It asks for a space without noise — a moment unclaimed, where something may surface in its own way without needing to be named at once. And sometimes, that’s precisely what slips away in our culture of experiences. We rush to see it all and miss what might have revealed itself, had we stayed just a little longer for it to linger.

Meaning doesn’t arrive on schedule. It unfolds in relation, in return, and never all at once.

So how do we ask questions without cutting off what hasn’t yet appeared?Do we ask in order to understand each other? Because we are genuinely curious? Do we ask to impose structure on what we encounter, so that what we hear can fit into what we already know (or think we know)?

A question can be an opening into the yet-to-be-discovered. But it can also be a way of placing and categorising. Some questions look like curiosity, but are hoping for answers they’ve already imagined.

Perhaps we need to approach more carefully. Not to hold back, but to make room for what hasn’t yet been said, and might only emerge in a conversation that stays open long enough for fragments and impressions to come together.

Experiencing something asks of us to ask questions that open exactly that kind of space. Especially when they are asked with wonder instead of demand, when they don’t aim for a quick takeaway, but inquire into what is still in process of becoming. Such questions open something when they give time and offer presence — when they recognise that meaning does not always emerge in the moment, but sometimes gathers later in the in-between.

When questions narrow the experience

What I experienced in Ayutthaya wasn’t just a moment from a trip. It reminded me how quickly we move to ask: What did you learn? What did you get out of it? As if learning and experience must be summarised before they’ve had time to settle.

I find that we often don’t ask to understand, but to confirm something within ourselves. To link someone else’s experience back into our way of seeing the world. And it was that same restlessness that was present in the question I was asked in Ayutthaya: “Which place made the biggest impression?”
Perhaps it was an attempt of orientation: Can I compare your experience with my experience? Can I place you within my own frame of understanding?

When a question comes too early, or when it pushes for a conclusion before the impressions have had time to take shape, something is cut short. But what if the most meaningful encounters happen precisely when we don’t understand right away. When we avoid reducing each other, or what we’ve experienced, to categories or quick summaries. When we stay a little longer with what is still unresolved.

Why do we avoid complexity in conversation?

Maybe we’ve learned to ask that way — quickly, categorising, directed forward. And we do it all the time, to keep the conversation moving, to find something to hold onto in each other’s experiences: What did you get out of it? What stood out? What did it lead to? Or even in more structured form: On a scale from 1 to 10 which statement best reflects your experience?

These kinds of questions, I think, aren’t wrong in themselves. They arise from something deeply recognisable within us, a need to make sense, to find direction, to hear something we can reflect ourselves in. A way of placing someone else’s experience inside our own frame of reference. But it shapes the conversation in a specific way.
It often only leaves room for what can already be clearly expressed, while what is still forming, what is sensed but not yet articulated, risks slipping away.

The flow of conversation might continue, but the depth disappears.
Something is lost when we try to contain the answer. When we look for the quick takeaway, rather than asking: What did you notice, not just what you saw, but what you felt? What stood out, while you were there?
But when complexity enters the conversation, the flow may break. It may not move as smoothly anymore, because it suddenly asks and demands of us that we listen, that we think, and stay with it. And that’s the tension — right there.

The challenge is to take complexity seriously, not as something overwhelming, but as something rich that can’t be pinned down, something that might open if we stay with it long enough.

Why do we step away just when something begins to open?

Perhaps because it’s time consuming, or because it demands something uncertain of us. Perhaps because we’re not used to conversation taking detours, or remaining in what doesn’t immediately make sense. But that isn’t where the conversation should end. That’s exactly where it belongs.

In my research, this is what I have to insist on — not to chase quick answers.
I must stay with what is contradictory, layered, alive, and doesn’t yet make sense — but might, if I remain with it long enough. I must ask questions that open rather than close. I have to stay with the complex, because it is where meaning arises. Not in resolution. But in the open.

I think that’s why the question stayed with me after Ayutthaya, because it pointed to something more general: that experience resists being reduced to yes or no, good or bad, before or after.

This isn’t just an opinion, but something I’ve come to recognise; that meaning arises in relation, in the interplay with something other than ourselves. And that it requires of us to step away, at least slightly, from the language of comparison and category.

The open question

Maybe it’s not about finding the right answers, but about asking questions that resist reduction. Questions that don’t revolve around ourselves as the reference point, and that therefore continue to have an effect long after we’ve left an experience.

“Which place made the biggest impression?”
Some questions open us while others hurry us into meaning. This one, I think, did both. It reached out with curiosity, but also with a need to know. A need to wrap the experience into something defined. Into an answer.

As I drove away from Ayutthaya that day, it was still the Buddha figures, the yellow cloth, and the open courtyard that stayed with me. Not as impression, but as something still revealing itself. Something that hadn’t said its last word. And maybe still hasn’t …

Originally published on Medium. Shared here to invite new readers

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