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

by David Brooks

When you’re accompanying someone, you’re in a state of relaxed awareness—attentive and sensitive and unhurried.

You’re not leading or directing the other person. You’re just riding alongside as they experience the ebbs and flows of daily life. You’re there to be of help, a faithful presence, open to whatever may come.

It’s a great talent—to be someone others consider lingerable.

I’m almost in a hurry and back to back

Before a person is going to be willing to share personal stuff, they have to know that you respect their personal stuff. They have to know that you see their reserve as a form of dignity, their withholding as a sign that they respect themselves.

“Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.”

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

Gold quote

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.

People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”

If you choose to pattern match, you seek status, then you judge others with their statuses. If you seek happiness, you judge others by how content they are. If you seek calmness, then your judgement is around stability. Our own experiences can hardly be altered bc others perceptive, unless that external verdict is something we perceive to be important. Life is a single player game with many many NPCs of different wight of influence and shelf life around you. The most we can do is to add our magnitude of influence into others storyline

“Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.”