21 observations from people watching

At the core of the tender person’s outlook is a simple-sounding but love-sustaining fact: they treat the other as no less fragile, flawed, and sensitive than they remember themselves to be—only around slightly different things.

• Definition : The practice of acknowledging the presence of others while deliberately avoiding sustained attention or intrusion.


• Example : Making brief eye contact with someone walking past yo

When you’re practicing Illuminationism, you’re offering a gaze that says, “I want to get to know you and be known by you.” It’s a gaze that positively answers the question everybody is unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: “Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?” The answers to those questions are conveye

What I’m saying is this: 1. You are born with this weird interiority that no one else can see. 2. You can’t see it either at first. But if you run enough experiments you get a sense of how that inner space behaves. In particular, you can figure out which types of people can fuse with your interiority and expand it. 3. You will not be able to explai