Building Bridges: The Art of Understanding People

How empathy, distraction, culture, and honesty quietly shape who we become

There is something quietly powerful about a one-on-one conversation when nobody is rushing. No notifications pinging. No audience to impress. Just Sarah and Janita aka Fruitloop, sitting on opposite sides of a screen, doing what most of us forget to do far too often: trying to understand another human being.

This conversation didn’t begin with philosophy. It began with scheduling — January dates, school hours, lunch with a father squeezed between meetings. The ordinary logistics of teenage life. And yet, almost without warning, it opened into something much larger: a thoughtful exploration of empathy, emotional intelligence, distraction, honesty, and how culture shapes the way we speak, listen, and connect.

What follows is not a lesson summary. It’s a snapshot of a moment — one that reminds us how much wisdom can live inside a teenager who is still learning how to keep her “head out of the clouds.”

A classroom without walls

The school year is winding down. Holidays are near. Lessons are being postponed, rearranged, pushed gently into January. The energy is relaxed — the kind that invites reflection rather than performance.

And then Janita asks a deceptively simple question:

“What do you think it means when we try to understand people?”

Sarah doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t give a textbook answer either.

Understanding people, she says, can mean emotions. Situations. Languages. Perspectives. It can mean what lawyers do when they listen to both sides. Or what psychologists do when they try to understand why someone behaves the way they do.

Already, the conversation has shifted. This isn’t about homework anymore. It’s about the invisible work we all do — or avoid — every day.

Reading people — and reading yourself

Janita introduces the idea of the “connection moment”: that warm, almost electric instant when you suddenly get someone — how they think, what they feel, what they need.

Sarah smiles. She thinks she’s good at that.

She likes to analyse people. To watch them. But — and this matters — she also believes you can’t truly understand someone without talking to them. Social media, she points out, is performance. Influencers show only what they want you to see. Real understanding requires conversation.

Honesty, for Sarah, isn’t optional. She wants friends who tell her the truth, even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts.

“If someone tells me what I do wrong,” she says, “I can grow.”

It’s a striking thing to hear from someone still navigating adolescence — a stage of life where most of us desperately avoid criticism. Sarah doesn’t avoid it. She welcomes it.

But she also admits something else: she speaks too fast. Thinks too late. Words rush out before she has time to filter them.

Misunderstandings happen. Often.

Her friends, she says, are used to it now. They even remind her of things she forgets — dates, plans, responsibilities. In French, she explains, there’s an expression for it: avoir la tête en l’air — to have your head in the air.

Or, as Fruitloop gently translates: your head in the clouds.

Distraction, discipline, and emotional intelligence

Sarah doesn’t blame her forgetfulness on laziness. She blames it on distraction — not just her phone, but everything. A pen on the table. A sound in the room. A thought that sparks ten more thoughts.

Her mind, she says, doesn’t know how to separate “good” information from “bad.”

And yet, she has already started teaching herself strategies to cope.

She writes things down. Leaves her phone in another room. Plays long YouTube videos or music — never voices — while working. Without calling it that, she’s describing self-regulation. Emotional intelligence in practice.

When Fruitloop introduces a quote — “We listen not to reply, but to understand” — Sarah connects it instantly to school. To learning answers just long enough to pass a test. To forgetting them immediately after.

Understanding, she says, only happens when you care.

And that insight becomes the emotional backbone of the conversation.

Understanding people avoids conflict. Deepens friendships. Builds emotional intelligence — the ability not just to recognise emotions, but to respond without judgment.

Sarah defines it beautifully:
An emotionally intelligent person doesn’t accuse. They ask what happened. They ask why you’re sad.

Empathy, she notes later, is not evenly distributed. Some people — like her maths teacher — seem to have none at all. No curiosity. No flexibility. Just rules.

And when empathy is missing, understanding collapses.

Culture, silence, and volume

Understanding people, Fruitloop reminds her, is also cultural.

Sarah lights up here. Spain. China. South Africa. Loud cultures. Quiet cultures. Expressive families. Reserved ones.

In Spain, she says, people grow up speaking loudly. Expressively. Emotionally. In China, people are often taught to be reserved, careful, contained.

When these worlds meet, misunderstanding is almost guaranteed.

Janita shares an example from South Africa: conversations so loud they sound like arguments — not because of anger, but because of openness. Volume, in this context, is not aggression. It’s transparency.

Sarah laughs and brings it back to her grandmother. Spanish. Optimistic. The kind of person who tells angry strangers to smile, even when it’s raining.

Different cultures. Different emotional grammars.

But the need beneath them is the same: to be seen, heard, and understood.

“When someone understands you,” Sarah says softly, “you feel like you’re not crazy.”

It’s a line that lands quietly — and stays.

Playfulness as truth

The conversation ends not with theory, but with play.

A series of imaginative questions — light, funny, revealing — opens a different door into understanding personality.

If empathy were a superpower?
Mind-reading.

If confusion were an animal?
A meerkat — alert, anxious, overthinking danger everywhere.

If you could download someone like an app?
She’d choose one that helps forget painful memories. Music would be part of it.

If people came with emoji faces?
The basics. Crying. Smiling. Love. Anger. Clear signals.

If humans had loading bars when thinking?
Stress speeds it up. Pressure makes it spin forever.

And if people came in flavours?

Coffee would be the hardest to understand.
She hates coffee. She admits she judges people who love it.

Fruitloop laughs. Shee likes coffee now — though she didn’t at her age. Bitter things, after all, often take time.

It’s a perfect metaphor to end on.

Understanding, like taste, evolves.

Your season of understanding

This conversation was never meant to be profound. And yet, it is — because it reflects something many of us forget: understanding people is not a skill you finish learning. It’s a practice. A habit. A choice.

It requires attention in a distracted world. Curiosity in a judgment-heavy one. Empathy when certainty feels easier.

Whether you’re a teenager learning to slow your words, or an adult learning to listen more deeply, the invitation is the same:

Pause. Notice. Ask. Care.

And maybe — just maybe — allow yourself to be understood too.