There are books I’ve finished and barely remember.
And then there are books I’ve never finished that somehow continue their conversation with me long after I’ve put them down.
Two of mine are the Qur’an and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I came to them for different reasons.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead touched a tradition already present in my spiritual life. Buddhism, along with Hinduism, has shaped much of the way I think about life, suffering, compassion, and our inner world.
The Qur’an was different.
There, I was stepping into a faith that wasn’t my own.
But underneath both was the same desire:
I wanted to understand.
I’ve always been curious about what other people believe—not because I’m looking to prove or disprove anything, but because belief tells us so much about how people understand what it means to be human.
What gives someone comfort when they are grieving?
What do they believe happens when we die?
How do they understand suffering?
Forgiveness?
Justice?
The divine?
What words have their families carried for generations?
What do they reach for when life becomes too heavy to carry alone?
Those questions fascinate me.
I’ve never believed I needed to agree with someone in order to listen to them.
And I don’t have to adopt another person’s faith to recognize that what is sacred to them deserves to be approached with respect.
Maybe that’s why I still think about books I haven’t finished.
I wasn’t reading them simply to reach the final page.
I was trying to look through a window.
For a little while, I wanted to set aside the instinct to interpret everything through what I already knew and instead ask:
What does the world look like from here?
Not so I could decide whether someone else was right or wrong.
Not so I could compare one faith against another and declare a winner.
Not even so I could find agreement.
I simply wanted to understand another human being a little better.
The older I get, the more important that feels.
We live in a world where it’s incredibly easy to form opinions about people we’ve never spoken with, cultures we’ve never experienced, and beliefs we’ve never taken the time to understand.
Sometimes we know what someone believes only because someone who doesn’t believe it told us.
I think we can do better than that.
What if curiosity came before judgment?
What if, before deciding what we think about someone’s religion, culture, traditions, or way of life, we became willing to learn what those things actually mean to the person living them?
Understanding isn’t agreement.
Respect isn’t conversion.
Listening doesn’t require surrendering what we believe.
Sometimes it simply requires enough humility to admit:
There are ways of experiencing this world that I have never known.
And perhaps that’s one of the reasons I read beyond the boundaries of my own experience.
Not to erase those boundaries.
But to see who’s standing on the other side of them.
I haven’t finished either of these books.
Maybe someday I will.
But I’m no longer sure finishing was ever the most important part.
Because both, in very different ways, have already reminded me of something I hope I never forget:
There is an enormous difference between knowing about people and taking the time to understand them.
I want to spend my life doing more of the second.