With new friends, you may begin to explore activities you have not regularly enjoyed in the past. While Friday nights out with friends and Saturday afternoon football games can be great fun, you might find a different kind of fulfillment in attending to your more spiritual side. Visiting a museum exhibit, taking in a play, enjoying a touring dance troupe, or listening to an orchestral performance are ways to feed your soul. Appreciating the arts will help you develop the sensitivities that bring richness to your life and will enable you to live life's joys and sorrows more deeply. Chances are that the new friends who would join you in such activities would also challenge you to reflect on your feelings and experiences and to expand your thinking. These new friends can become those teachers you will need along your journey.
Engaging in Dialogue

So far, you've read about getting in touch with yourself, traveling with a trusted guide, and growing in the company of selfaware others. The word dialogue has been used several times to describe the kind of contemplative activity that might transpire within yourself or with others. This might be a good time to distinguish dialogue from superficial conversation. Guided by a spirit of discovery and exploration, the purpose of dialogue is to learn about yourself and others, to gain knowledge, insight, and understanding, to heighten sensitivity, to understand inconsistencies, and to alter existing mental schemas (Burbules, 1993). Though dialogue is central to multiperspective inqui7y as discussed in chapter 3, it is just as important in autobiographical inquiry. Through dialogue, you are able to question, to respond, and to redirect to bring about a change in yourself, to reconstruct your understanding, and to decide on and refine priorities.
Dialogue is serious and deep discussion entered into with confidentiality, commitment, reciprocity, respect, and concern. Dialogue can only be achieved in a safe place. It cannot exist in threatening, hostile environments. It can only exist when individuals are open minded, egalitarian, inclusive, caring, loving, and constructively evaluative (Fay, 1987).