Allowing freedom

Anyhow, I feel that when we talk to people, even and perhaps especially to those whom we consider narrow minded or conservative (its tough perhaps with strongly fundamentalist people) to interview them in ways that create an environment of exploration and pause and the fearless-ness that nothing is judged and so we can together go into a question, a quest. That in fact there is a possibility of a quest of knowledge, of thought and feeling… a manthan of sorts. This itself is a capacity that lies right at hand and is repeatedly lost…  we fill the silences of reflection, when the images/implications of our own words are being reflected back on us, and so we keep stating what we state, with all its contradictions and emptinesses. Surely contradiction is not a problem, but yet a freer person is more integrated, even while we may accept that there are a million ways of being integrated… in all this the challenge I encounter most is keeping my own mouth shut and allowing such spaces to emerge. And also I wonder, the data that emerges from such conversations, is it sociology? Can sociology capture a person in movement, rather than a person revealed? Is sociology interested? We think of sociology as therapeutic, assuming that its content will do the therapy. Perhaps sometimes sociology has to take a backseat to therapy, better still, to ‘lived freedom’.