How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

ACTIVE CURIOSITY. You want to have an explorer’s heart. The novelist Zadie Smith once wrote that when she was a girl, she was constantly imagining what it would be like to grow up in the homes of her friends. “I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave,” she wrote. “That is, what it would be like to be P

Eiseley’s essay about this experience is called “The Flow of the River.” In it, he’s not only describing the Platte; he’s describing how he felt he was merging with the river. He recounts a sort of open awareness of the connections between all creatures, all nature. He wasn’t swimming in the river. He wasn’t investigating the river. He was accompan

Being a therapist, she argues, is less about providing solutions and more “a way of paying attention, which is the purest form of love.”

You may just be chatting with someone about the weather, but I ask you to assume that the person in front of you contains some piece of themselves that has no weight, size, color, or shape yet gives them infinite value and dignity. If you consider that each person has a soul, you will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside the

As D. H. Lawrence put it: Whoever wants life must go softly towards life, softly as one would go towards a deer and fawn that are nestling under a tree. One gesture of violence, one violent assertion of self-will and life is gone….But with quietness, with an abandon of self-assertion and a fullness of the deep true self one can approach another hum

The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.

George Bernard Shaw got it right: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.

“Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.”

Sometimes things that are hard to live through are very satisfying to remember.