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

In these normal moments of life, you’re not staring deeply into another’s eyes or unveiling profound intimacies. You’re just doing stuff together—not face-to-face but side by side. You are accompanying each other.

I’m trying to emphasize the presence of the past, how the dead live in us. Research by Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn found that people who are descended from those who practiced plow-heavy agriculture tend to live in cultures that have strongly defined gender roles, because it was mostly men who drove the plow. On the other hand,

Looping forces you to listen more carefully. Other people will sense the change in you. Looping is also a good way to keep the other person focused on their core point, rather than drifting away on some tangent.

Literature, she argued, “is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves.”

as the writer Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

C. S. Lewis once observed that grief is not a state but a process. It’s a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed, and yet somehow it repeats and repeats.

One of the great fallacies of life is to think culture is everything; another great fallacy is to think culture is nothing.

Being an Illuminator, seeing other people in all their fullness, doesn’t just happen. It’s a craft, a set of skills, a way of life. Other cultures have words for this way of being. The Koreans call it nunchi, the ability to be sensitive to other people’s moods and thoughts. The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s