《How to Know a Person》笔记

399.「She’s learned, finally, that it’s not only the epic acts of heroism and altruism that define a person’s character; it’s the everyday acts of encounter. It is the simple capacity to make another person feel seen and understood—that hard but essential skill that makes a person a treasured co-worker, citizen, lover, spouse, and friend.」

书籍名称：《How to Know a Person》
基础信息：David Brooks / 2023 / Random House
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读完时间：2024-10-17 13:58:59
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《The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen》

David Brooks

71个笔记

Chapter One: The Power of Being Seen

• One day about fifteen years ago, I was at a game in Baltimore when a hitter’s bat shattered, and the whole bat except the knob helicoptered over the dugout and landed at my feet. I reached down and grabbed it. Getting a bat at a game is a thousand times better than getting a ball! I should have been jumping up and down, waving my trophy in the air, high-fiving the people around me, becoming a temporary jumbotron celebrity. Instead, I just placed the bat at my feet and sat, still-faced, as everyone stared at me. Looking back, I want to scream at myself: “Show a little joy!” But when it came to spontaneous displays of emotion, I had the emotional capacity of a head of cabbage.
• One day, not long ago, I was reading a dull book at my dining room table when I looked up and saw my wife framed in the front doorway of our house. The door was open. The late afternoon light was streaming in around her. Her mind was elsewhere, but her gaze was resting on a white orchid that we kept in a pot on a table by the door.
• I paused, and looked at her with a special attention, and had a strange and wonderful awareness ripple across my mind: “I know her,” I thought. “I really know her, through and through.”
• If you had asked what it was exactly that I knew about her in that moment, I would have had trouble answering. It wasn’t any collection of facts about her, or her life story, or even something expressible in the words I’d use to describe her to a stranger. It was the whole flowing of her being—the incandescence of her smile, the undercurrent of her insecurities, the rare flashes of fierceness, the vibrancy of her spirit. It was the lifts and harmonies of her music.
• I wasn’t seeing pieces of her or having specific memories. What I saw, or felt I saw, was the wholeness of her. How her consciousness creates her reality. It’s what happens when you’ve been with someone for a while, endured and delighted together, and slowly grown an intuitive sense for how that person feels and responds. It might even be accurate to say that for a magical moment I wasn’t seeing her, I was seeing out from her. Perhaps to really know another person, you have to have a glimmer of how they experience the world. To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.

Chapter Four: Accompaniment

• Accompaniment often involves a surrender of power that is beautiful to behold. A teacher could offer the answers, but he wants to walk with his students as they figure out how to solve a problem. A manager could give orders, but sometimes leadership means assisting employees as they become masters of their own task. A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think. Pope Paul VI said it wonderfully: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.”
• In his book Consolations, the essayist and poet David Whyte observed that the ultimate touchstone of friendship “is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

Chapter Five: What Is a Person?

• In other words, there are two layers of reality. There is the objective reality of what happens, and there is the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful. That second subjective layer can sometimes be the more important layer. As the Yale psychologist Marc Brackett puts it, “Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.” This subjective layer is what we want to focus on in our quest to know other people. The crucial question is not “What happened to this person?” or “What are the items on their résumé?” Instead, we should ask: “How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct their reality?” This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.

Chapter Six: Good Talks

• Does everybody know how to have a good conversation? Not by a long shot. I was once on a call with a government official who was lecturing me about something or other when our call dropped. I expected he’d call me right back. Five minutes passed. Seven. Finally, I called his office. His assistant said he couldn’t talk because he was on the phone. I told her, “You don’t understand. He’s on the phone with me! He doesn’t realize that our call dropped ten minutes ago. He’s just blathering on!” Maybe I bring this out in people, but I often find myself on the receiving end of what the journalist Calvin Trillin calls bore bombs—people who think conversation is them giving you a lecture. I’ve had to make a resolution: If you call me up or invite me for coffee and then talk at me with not even a single molecule’s worth of interest in what I might be thinking, we will not be enjoying each other’s company again.
• TREAT ATTENTION AS AN ON/OFF SWITCH, NOT A DIMMER. We’ve all had the experience of telling somebody something and noticing that they are not really listening. It feels like you’re sending a message out to them and they’re just letting it fly past. You become self-conscious, start stumbling, and finally trail off.
• The problem is that the average person speaks at the rate of about 120 to 150 words a minute, which is not nearly enough data to occupy the brain of the person being spoken to. If you are socially anxious, you probably have so many thoughts about yourself dancing around in your head, they threaten to hijack your attention from whatever the person in front of you is saying. The solution as a listener is to treat attention as all or nothing. If you’re here in this conversation, you’re going to stop doing anything else and just pay attention to this. You’re going to apply what some experts call the SLANT method: sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod your head, track the speaker. Listen with your eyes. That’s paying attention 100 percent.
• Everyone in a conversation is facing an internal conflict between self-expression and self-inhibition. If you listen passively, the other person is likely to become inhibited. Active listening, on the other hand, is an invitation to express. One way to think of it is through the metaphor of hospitality. When you are listening, you are like the host of a dinner party. You have set the scene. You’re exuding warmth toward your guests, showing how happy you are to be with them, drawing them closer to where they want to go. When you are speaking, you are like a guest at a dinner party. You are bringing gifts.
• Hovde holds his arm straight out and asks, “If a story someone is telling you starts at the shoulder and ends at the fingertips, where do we stop listening?” For most people, around the elbow is where they stop really listening and start formulating their response. This is a problem, because speaking and listening involve many of the same brain areas, so once you go into response mode, your ability to listen deteriorates. Like a good improv comedian, a good conversationalist controls her impatience and listens to learn, rather than to respond. That means she’ll wait for the end of the other person’s comment, and then pause for a few beats to consider how to respond to what’s been said, holding up her hand, so the other person doesn’t just keep on talking. Taking that extra breath creates space for reflection.
• KEEP THE GEM STATEMENT AT THE CENTER. In the midst of many difficult conversations, there is what the mediator Adar Cohen calls “the gem statement.” This is the truth underneath the disagreement, something you both agree on: “Even when we can’t agree on Dad’s medical care, I’ve never doubted your good intentions. I know we both want the best for him.” If you can both return to the gem statement during a conflict, you can keep the relationship between you strong.

Chapter Seven: The Right Questions

• “People love to do the thing they are wired to do,” he says. A person can go a long way with a narrow skill set.
• The average child asks about forty thousand questions between the ages of two and five. And most kids are fantastic at questioning.
• Kids aren’t afraid to ask blunt question. But at some point during late childhood or adolescence, many of us begin to withdraw from intimacy. I’d say it’s because society sends the message that we shouldn’t show emotions, shouldn’t get personal; or it sends the message that if we show the world who we really are, people won’t like us. Asking good questions can be a weirdly vulnerable activity. You’re admitting that you don’t know. An insecure, self-protective world is a world with fewer questions.
• As the psychologist Nicholas Epley observes, perspective taking is untrustworthy, but perspective receiving works quite well. If I’m going to get to know you, it’s not because I have the magical ability to peer into your soul; it’s because I have the skill of asking the sorts of questions that will give you a chance to tell me about who you are.
• The worst kinds of questions are the ones that don’t involve a surrender of power, that evaluate: Where did you go to college? What neighborhood do you live in? What do you do? They imply, “I’m about to judge you.”
• Closed questions are also bad questions. Instead of surrendering power, the questioner is imposing a limit on how the question can be answered. For example, if you mention your mother and I ask, “Were you close?,” then I’ve limited your description of your relationship with your mother to the close/distant frame. It’s better to ask, “How is your mother?” That gives the answerer the freedom to go as deep or as shallow as he wants.
• “If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?”
• In modern society, we generally refrain from asking the kinds of big questions I’ve just laid out. I guess we’re afraid of invading people’s privacy, afraid that the conversation will get too heavy. It’s a legitimate concern. But I’ve found in almost all cases that people are too shy about asking questions, not too aggressive. People are a lot more eager to have deep conversations than you think.
• Each person is a mystery. And when you are surrounded by mysteries, as the saying goes, it’s best to live life in the form of a question.

Chapter Nine: Hard Conversations

• There’s a temptation to try to yank the conversation back to your frame: Here’s how the situation looks to me. Here’s what I’m doing to alleviate that problem. Here are all the other problems I have you might not be aware of. There’s a temptation, in other words, to revert to the frames you feel comfortable with.
• It’s best to avoid this temptation. As soon as somebody starts talking about times when they felt excluded, betrayed, or wronged, stop and listen. When somebody is talking to you about pain in their life, even in those cases when you may think their pain is performative or exaggerated, it’s best not to try to yank the conversations back to your frame. Your first job is to stay within the other person’s standpoint to more fully understand how the world looks to them. Your next job is to encourage them to go into more depth about what they have just said. “I want to understand your point of view as much as possible. What am I missing here?” Curiosity is the ability to explore something even in stressful and difficult circumstances.
• Like every writer, I am often the recipient of furious, insulting emails. Like every writer, I have found that if you respond to such emails in a way that is respectful and curious, the other person’s tone almost always changes—immediately and radically. Suddenly they are civil, kinder, more human. Everybody wants to be heard. Most people are willing to make an extra effort to be kind, considerate, and forgiving when you give them the chance. Most people long to heal the divides that plague our society. At the foundation of all conversation lies one elemental reality: We all share a vast range of common struggles, common experiences, and common joys. Even in the midst of civil strife and hard conversations, I try to return to the great humanistic declaration made by the Roman dramatist Terence: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”

Chapter Ten: How Do You Serve a Friend Who Is in Despair?

• My most searing encounter with depression came when the illness hit my oldest friend, Peter Marks. Starting at age eleven, Pete and I had built our friendship around play. We played basketball, softball, capture the flag, rugby. We teased each other, pulled pranks, made fun of each other’s dance moves, romantic misalliances, and pretty much everything else. We could turn eating a burger into a form of play, with elaborate smacking of lips and operatic exclamations about the excellence of the cheese. We kept it up for five decades.
• My wife has a phrase that got Pete just right: He was a rare combo of normal and extraordinary. He was masculine in the way you’re supposed to be masculine, with great strength and great gentleness. A father in the way you’re supposed to be a father, with endless devotion, a sense of fun and pride. A husband in the way you’re supposed to be a husband, going home at night grateful that the one person in the whole world you most want to talk with is going to be sitting right there across the dinner table from you.
• Over the years, Pete and I talked frequently about the stresses he was having with a couple of colleagues at work, but I didn’t understand all that he was enduring until we spent a weekend with him in the spring of 2019. My wife noticed a change immediately. A light had gone out. There was a flatness in his voice, a stillness in his eyes. One bright June afternoon, he pulled us aside and told us what we knew already: He wasn’t himself. He was doing what he loved most—playing basketball, swimming in the lake—but he couldn’t enjoy anything. He was worried for his family and himself and asked for our continued friendship and support. It was the first time I had seen such pain in him—what turned out to be severe depression. I was confronted with a question I was unprepared to answer: How do you serve a friend when they are hit with this illness?
• I tried the best I could, but Pete succumbed to suicide in April 2022. This chapter, based on an essay I wrote for the Times, attempts to capture what I learned from those agonizing three years and that senseless tragedy. It reflects a hard education with no panaceas.
• First, I need to tell you more about Pete. We met as kids at Incarnation Camp in Connecticut, were campers and counselors together for a decade, and remained close for life. At camp, Pete was handsome, strong, athletic, and kind. There was an exuberant goofballism about him. Once, in a fit of high silliness, he started skipping around the dining hall, singing and leaping higher and higher with each skip. He tried to skip right out of the room, but there was a doorframe, probably about seven feet tall, and Pete slammed his forehead into the top of the frame and fell flat on his back. The rest of us, being sixteen-year-old junior counselors, found this utterly hilarious. Pete, also being sixteen, found it utterly hilarious, too. I remember him lying there in a fit of giggles, with a doorframe-shaped bruise forming on his brow.
• One summer, Pete and I led a team of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in a softball game against a team of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. Miraculously, our team won. In the celebration afterward, the boys, Pete, and I piled on one another on the pitcher’s mound in a great wriggling heap of disproportionate ecstasy. We hugged and screamed and high-fived. I think our celebration lasted longer than the game—a volcano of male self-approval that is lodged in my memory as one of life’s moments of pure joy.
• He seemed, outwardly, like the person in my circle least likely to be afflicted by a devastating depression, with a cheerful disposition, a happy marriage, a rewarding career, and two truly wonderful sons, Owen and James. But he was carrying more childhood pain than I knew, and eventually the trauma overtook him.
• At first, I did not understand the seriousness of the situation. That’s partly temperamental. Some people catastrophize and imagine the worst. I tend to bright-icize and assume that everything will work out. But it’s also partly because I didn’t realize that depression had created another Pete. I had very definite ideas in my head about who Pete was, and depression did not figure into how I understood my friend.
• Over the next months, severe depression was revealed to me as an unimagined abyss. I learned that those of us lucky enough never to have experienced serious depression cannot understand what it is like just by extrapolating from our own periods of sadness. As the philosophers Cecily Whiteley and Jonathan Birch have written, it is not just sorrow, it is a state of consciousness that distorts perceptions of time, space, and self.
• The journalist Sally Brampton called depression a landscape that “is cold and black and empty. It is more terrifying and more horrible than anywhere I have ever been, even in my nightmares.”
• During the Covid-19 pandemic, Pete and I spoke by phone. In the beginning, I made the mistake of trying to advise him about how he could recover from the illness. Years earlier, he had gone to Vietnam to perform eye surgeries for those who were too poor to afford them. I told him he should do that again, since he had found it so rewarding. I did not realize that it was energy and desire he lacked, not ideas about things to do. It was only later that I read that when you give a depressed person advice on how they can get better, there’s a good chance all you are doing is telling the person that you just don’t get it.
• I tried to remind Pete of all the wonderful blessings he enjoyed, what psychologists call “positive reframing.” I’ve since read that this might make the sufferer feel even worse about themselves for not being able to enjoy all the things that are palpably enjoyable.
• I learned, very gradually, that a friend’s job in these circumstances is not to cheer the person up. It’s to acknowledge the reality of the situation; it’s to hear, respect, and love them; it’s to show them you haven’t given up on them, you haven’t walked away.
• Time and again Pete would talk about his great fear that someday his skill as a surgeon would abandon him, that he would cease to be a healer, that he would lose his identity and self. As Pete spoke of his illness, it sometimes seemed as if there were two of him. There was the one enveloped in pain and the one who was observing all this and could not understand what was happening. That second self was the Pete I spoke to for those three years. He was analyzing the anguish. He was trying to figure it out. He was going to the best doctors. They were trying one approach after another. The cloud would not lift. I am told that one of the brutalities of the illness is the impossibility of articulating exactly what the pain consists of. Pete would give me the general truth: “Depression sucks.” But he tried not to burden me with the full horrors of what he was going through. There was a lot he didn’t tell me, at least until the end, or not at all.
• There were moments during that hard plague year of 2020 that I feared my own mind was slipping. Cheerfulness is my normal default state, but that year my moods could be dark and troubled. When your oldest friend is battling his demons, it’s natural to wonder about your own.
• While I’ve devoted my life to words, I increasingly came up against the futility of words to help Pete in any meaningful way. The feeling of impotence was existential.
• After a while, I just tried to be normal. I just tried to be the easygoing friend that I had always been to him and he had always been to me. I hoped this would slightly ease his sense of isolation. Intellectually, Pete knew that his wife and boys lavishly loved him, that his friends loved him, but he still felt locked inside the lacerating self-obsession that was part of the illness.
• Since Pete’s death, I’ve learned more about the power of just staying present. “If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve to never ask them why,” the actor Stephen Fry once wrote. “Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”
• Jen had some wise words when I asked her what she had learned from being around him during those years. “I was very aware this was not the real Pete,” she said. “I tried not to take things personally.” I wish I had bombarded Pete with more small touches. Just little notes and emails to let him know how much he was on my mind. Writing about his own depression in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Ruoff mentioned that his brother sent him more than seven hundred postcards over the years, from all fifty states, Central America, Canada, and Asia. Those kinds of touches say: I’m with you. No response necessary.
• “There are moments in our lives,” Honoré de Balzac wrote, “when the sense that our friend is near is all that we can bear. Our wounds smart under the consoling words that only reveal the depths of pain.”
• Pete developed theories to explain why this had happened to him. He pointed to a series of traumas and neglect he had suffered at home as a child—events he had vaguely referred to during our friendship but never really went into detail with me until his final years.
• He thought part of his illness was just straight biology. Think of it like brain cancer, he’d say. A random physical disease. I agree with some of that, but I’m also haunted by the vast number of medications his doctors put him on. He always seemed to be getting on one or getting off another as he ran through various treatment regimes. His path through the mental healthcare system was filled with a scattershot array of different treatments and crushing disappointments.
• I don’t know what he was thinking on his final day, but I have read that depression makes it hard to imagine a time when things will ever be better. I have no evidence for this, but knowing Pete as I do, I strongly believe that he erroneously convinced himself that he was committing suicide to help his family and ease the hardship his illness had caused them. Living now in the wreckage, I can tell you if you ever find yourself having that thought, it is completely wrong.
• “Little has been written about the fact that depression is ridiculous,” Andrew Solomon, the author of The Noonday Demon, wrote. “I can remember lying frozen in bed, crying because I was too frightened to take a shower and at the same time knowing that showers are not scary.” I would add that depression is bitterly ridiculous. Pete died a few weeks before his younger son’s college graduation, enmeshed by loving relationships and friendships, with so much to give.
• Pete’s death disoriented me. He’d been a presence for practically my whole life, and suddenly the steady friendship I took for granted was gone. It’s as if I went back to Montana and suddenly the mountains had disappeared.
• One great source of comfort has been the chance to glimpse, from time to time, how heroically Pete’s boys, Owen and James, have handled this loss. In their own grief, they have rallied around their mother. Two months after Pete’s passing, my eldest son got married. To my great astonishment and gratitude, Jen and the boys were able to make the trip to attend. At the reception, the boys gently coaxed their mother to join us on the dance floor. It felt appropriate, since this was what we did at camp; dancing skeined through the decades of our lives. I have a sharp memory of those two fine young men dancing that evening, and a million memories of the parents who raised them so well.
• When we are trying to see a depressed person deeply, and make them feel heard and understood, we are peering into a nightmarish Salvador Dalí world, one that doesn’t follow any of our logic, that doesn’t make any sense, and that the depressed person will probably have difficulty describing for us. There is no easy way to get even partly into this alternate reality; we can only try to persevere through a leap of faith, through endless flexibility, and through a willingness to be humble before the fact that none of this makes any sense.

Chapter Eleven: The Art of Empathy

• On the other hand, men with a poor relationship with their mothers were more likely to suffer from dementia in old age. Those who grew up in cold homes took more prescription drugs of all kinds, and spent five times as much time in psychiatric hospitals. As the study’s longtime director George Vaillant put it, “Whereas a warm childhood, like a rich father, tends to inoculate a man against future pain, a bleak childhood is like poverty; it cannot cushion the difficulties of life. Yes, difficulties may sometimes lead to post-traumatic growth, and some men’s lives did improve over time. But there is always a high cost in pain and lost opportunities, and for many men with bleak childhoods the outlook remained bleak until they died, sometimes young and sometimes by their own hands.”
• AVOIDANCE. Avoidance is usually about fear. Emotions and relationships have hurt me, so I will minimize emotions and relationships. People who are avoidant feel most comfortable when the conversation stays superficial. They often overintellectualize life. They retreat to work. They try to be self-sufficient and pretend they don’t have needs. Often, they have not had close relationships as kids and have lowered their expectations about future relationships. A person who fears intimacy in this way may be always on the move, preferring not to be rooted or pinned down; they are sometimes relentlessly positive so as not to display vulnerability; they engineer things so they are the strong one others turn to but never the one who turns to others.
• DEPRIVATION. Some children are raised around people so self-centered that the needs of the child are ignored. The child naturally learns the lesson “My needs won’t be met.” It is a short step from that to “I’m not worthy.” A person haunted by a deprivation schema can experience feelings of worthlessness throughout life no matter how many amazing successes they achieve. They often carry the idea that there is some flaw deep within themselves, that if other people knew it, it would cause them to run away. When they are treated badly, they are likely to blame themselves. (Of course he had an affair; I’m a pathetic wife.) They sometimes grapple with a fierce inner critic.
• OVERREACTIVITY. Children who are abused and threatened grow up in a dangerous world. The person afflicted in this way often has, deep in their nervous system, a hyperactive threat-detection system. Such people interpret ambivalent situations as menacing situations, neutral faces as angry faces. They are trapped in a hyperactive mind theater in which the world is dangerous. They overreact to things and fail to understand why they did so.
• PASSIVE AGGRESSION. Passive aggression is the indirect expression of anger. It is a way to sidestep direct communication by a person who fears conflict, who has trouble dealing with negative emotions. It’s possible such a person grew up in a home where anger was terrifying, where emotions were not addressed, or where love was conditional and the lesson was that direct communication would lead to the withdrawal of affection. Passive aggression is thus a form of emotional manipulation, a subtle power play to extract guilt and affection. A husband with passive-aggressive tendencies may encourage his wife to go on a weekend outing with her friends, feeling himself to be a selfless martyr, but then get angry with her in the days before the outing and through the weekend. He’ll let her know by various acts of withdrawal and self-pity that she’s a selfish person and he’s an innocent victim.
• These defenses are not entirely bad. I once read a great phrase in a book by the British writer Will Storr that captures the dual nature of our defenses. He proposed that most great fictional characters—and, by implication, most great people—have a “sacred flaw.” His point was that each of us goes around with certain models in our head that shape how we see the world. You build these models, starting early in life, and they work for you. They help you defend yourself from neglect or abuse. They help you anticipate how people are going to behave. They steer you to act in ways that get you affirmed and loved. The big thing your models do is help you see your life as a story in which you are the hero. We seek out the people, the articles, and the books that confirm our models.
• I once toured a vineyard where the guy giving the tour explained that they don’t plant their vines in the kind of soil that is gentlest on the vines. They plant their vines in clay soil because clay resists the vines, and the vines grow strong by fighting against their environment.
• The lessons we learned about how to survive childhood are often obsolete by the time we hit adulthood. But we continue to see the world through these old models; our actions are still guided by our old models. This is called “conceptual blindness” and explains why very smart people can sometimes do phenomenally stupid things. Think, for example, of those generals in World War I. They were educated as cadets in the age of the cavalry charges, and they built up models of war that were appropriate in the era of horses and rifles. But decades later, after they had become generals, they found themselves leading troops in the age of machine guns. Only they hadn’t updated their models. Year after year, they sent millions of men charging directly into machine gun nests, and to their deaths, because they couldn’t see that their models were obsolete. It was mass slaughter. Conceptual blindness can happen to anyone.
• At some point in their lives, most people come to realize that some of their models are no longer working. The defenses they built up in childhood are limiting them in adulthood. The avoidant person wants to become more attached. The person with a deprivation schema wants to feel her full worth. The overreactive person realizes that a life of constant strife only brings ruin on herself and those she loves. This moment usually arises as a crisis. A person, because of their own stupid behavior, has broken a marriage, been fired from a job, lost a friend, hurt their children, suffered a public humiliation. Their world has crumbled.
• In theory, it should be possible to repair yourself alone. In theory, it should be possible to understand yourself, especially the deep broken parts of yourself, through introspection. But the research clearly shows that introspection is overrated.
• That’s in part because what’s going on in your mind is not only more complicated than you understand, it is more complicated than you can understand. Your mind hides most of your thinking so you can get on with life. Furthermore, you’re too close to yourself. You can’t see the models you use to perceive the world because you’re seeing with them. Finally, when people are trying to see themselves by themselves, they tend to bend off in one of two unhelpful directions. Sometimes they settle for the easy insight. They tell themselves they’ve just had a great epiphany. In actuality, they’ve done nothing more than come up with a make-believe story that will help them feel good about themselves. Or else they spiral into rumination. They revisit the same flaws and traumatic experiences over and over again, reinforcing their bad mental habits, making themselves miserable.

Chapter Twelve: How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings?

• The writer David Lodge once noted that 90 percent of what we call writing is actually reading. It’s going back over your work so you can change and improve it.

Chapter Fourteen: Life Tasks

• In their book How Babies Think, Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl point out that newborns are nearsighted. An object a foot away—like the face of a nursing mother—is in sharp focus, but everything farther away is blurred. To a newborn, the world looks like a bunch of Rembrandt portraits: brightly lit faces, full of meaning and expression, popping out from a blurry background.

Chapter Sixteen: How Do Your Ancestors Show Up in Your Life?

• In those days in the South there were certain superstitions about how to behave in the presence of the dying: remove the pillow from beneath the dying person’s head to ease their trip into the afterlife; cover the faces of any clocks in the room, because a clock would never work again if the dying person looked at it; drape all the mirrors. Lucy wanted none of these superstitions observed as she lay dying and asked Zora to make sure they wouldn’t be. As her mother was rasping her last breaths, the other family members took the pillow away and covered the clocks and mirrors. Zora protested, but her father held her down. Her mother was heaving, trying to say something, but no one could tell what. Then she died. That failure to heed her mother’s final wishes tortured Hurston for the rest of her life. “In the midst of play, in wakeful moments after midnight, on the way home from parties, and even in the classroom during lectures. My thoughts would escape occasionally from their confines and stare me down.” She would never know what her dying mother wanted to tell her.

Chapter Seventeen: What Is Wisdom?

• These days my ears perk up whenever I come across a story in which one person deeply saw another. For example, recently a friend mentioned to me that his daughter had been struggling in second grade. She felt like she wasn’t quite fitting in with her classmates. But then one day her teacher said to her, “You know, you’re really good at thinking before you speak.” That one comment, my friend said, helped turn his daughter’s whole year around. Something that she might have perceived as a weakness—her quietness or social awkwardness—was now perceived as a strength. Her teacher saw her.
• A woman told me about the time when she was thirteen and she went to her first party and had her first alcohol. She was dropped off at home so drunk that all she could do was lie on the front porch, barely able to move. Her father—a big, strict disciplinarian—came out and she thought he was going to scream at her the very thoughts she was thinking about herself: “I’m bad. I’m bad.” Instead, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her inside and placed her on the living room couch and said, “There’ll be no punishment here. You’ve had an experience.” He knew what she was thinking; she felt seen.
• An Illuminator is a blessing to those around him. When he meets others he has a compassionate awareness of human frailty, because he knows the ways we are all frail. He is gracious toward human folly because he’s aware of all the ways we are foolish. He accepts the unavoidability of conflict and greets disagreement with curiosity and respect.
• She who only looks inward will find only chaos, and she who looks outward with the eyes of critical judgment will find only flaws. But she who looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life as best they can. The person who masters the skills we’ve been describing here will have an acute perceptiveness. She’ll notice this person’s rigid posture and that person’s anxious tremor. She’ll envelop people in a loving gaze, a visual embrace that will not only help her feel what they are experiencing, but give those around her the sense that she is right there with them, that she is sharing what they are going through. And she will maintain this capacious loving attention even as the callousness of the world rises around her, following the advice in that sage W. H. Auden poem: “If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.” She’s learned, finally, that it’s not only the epic acts of heroism and altruism that define a person’s character; it’s the everyday acts of encounter. It is the simple capacity to make another person feel seen and understood—that hard but essential skill that makes a person a treasured co-worker, citizen, lover, spouse, and friend.

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