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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.
The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.
There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.
No crueler punishment can be devised than to not see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible.
“Artificial intelligence is going to do many things for us in the decades ahead, and replace humans at many tasks, but one thing it will never be able to do is to create person-to-person connections.
No one can fully appreciate their own beauty and strengths unless those things are mirrored back to them in the mind of another.
To survive, pluralistic societies require citizens who can look across difference and show the kind of understanding that is a prerequisite of trust—who can say, at the very least, “I’m beginning to see you. Certainly, I will never fully experience the world as you experience it, but I’m beginning, a bit, to see the world through your eyes.”
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.
The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.
When Jimmy sees a person—any person—he is seeing a creature who was made in the image of God. As he looks into each face, he is looking, at least a bit, into the face of God. When Jimmy sees a person, any person, he is also seeing a creature endowed with an immortal soul—a soul of infinite value and dignity. When Jimmy greets a person, he is also trying to live up to one of the great callings of his faith: He is trying to see that person the way Jesus would see that person.
person has a soul, you will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside them.
If you see the people you meet as precious souls, you’ll probably wind up treating them well.
Palmer is saying that the way we attend to others determines the kind of person we become. If we see people generously, we will become generous, or if we view them coldly, we will become cold. Palmer’s observation is essential, because he is pointing to a modern answer to an ancient question: How do I become a better person?
Morality is mostly about how you pay attention to others. Moral behavior happens continuously throughout the day, even during the seemingly uneventful and everyday moments.
morality is about the skill of being considerate toward others in the complex situations of life. It’s about being a genius at the close at hand.
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.
Sometimes you can learn more about a person by watching how they talk to a waiter than by asking some profound question about their philosophy of life. Even when you know someone well, I find that if you don’t talk about the little things on a regular basis, it’s hard to talk about the big things.
I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” They are the sort of people you want to linger with at the table after a meal or in chairs outside by the pool, to let things flow, to let the relationship emerge. It’s a great talent—to be someone others consider lingerable.
Accompaniment often involves a surrender of power that is beautiful to behold.
Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it. “The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
For example, in normal conversation, people often slur and mispronounce words. If you heard each word someone said in isolation, you wouldn’t be able to understand 50 percent of them. But because your mind is so good at predicting what words probably should be in what sentence, you can easily create a coherent flow of meaning from other people’s talk.
You’re engaged in a mutual exploration. Suddenly, instead of just repeating our arguments, we’re pulling stories out of each other. As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett puts it, “Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.”
Sometimes a broad, dumb question is better than a smart question, especially one meant to display how well-informed you are.
I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you are asking a good question, you are adopting a posture of humility.
The thing we need most is relationships. The thing we seem to suck at most is relationships.
We see ourselves as others see us, and when we feel invisible, well, we have a tendency to fall to pieces.
“A great conversation is between two people who think the other is wrong. A bad conversation is between those who think something is wrong with you.”
One of the reasons hard conversations are necessary is that we have to ask other people the obvious questions—How do you see this?—if we’re going to have any hope of entering, even a bit, into their point of view. Our differences of perception are rooted deep in the hidden kingdom of the unconscious mind and we’re generally not aware how profound those differences are until we ask.
There are mysterious depths to each person. There are vast differences between different cultures, before which we need to stand with respect and awe. Nevertheless, I have found that if you work on your skills—your capacity to see and hear others—you really can get a sense of another person’s perspective.
Introspection isn’t the best way to repair your models; communication is. People trying to grapple with the adult legacies of their childhood wounds need friends who will prod them to see their situation accurately. They need friends who can provide the outside view of them, the one they can’t see from within. They need friends who will remind them, “The most important part of your life is ahead of you, not behind you. I’m proud to know you and proud of everything you’ve accomplished and will accomplish.”
If mentalizing is me projecting my experiences onto you, caring involves getting out of my experiences and understanding that what you need may be very different from what I would need in that situation. This is hard. The world is full of people who are nice; there are many fewer who are effectively kind.
To know a person well, you have to know who they were before they suffered their losses and how they remade their whole outlook after them. If a subtext of this book is that experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you, then one of the subsequent lessons is that to know someone who has grieved, you have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared?
Decades later, Buechner came to the following realization: “The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.”
He had come to realize that excavation is not a solitary activity. It’s by sharing our griefs with others, and thinking together about what they mean, that we learn to overcome fear and know each other at the deepest level.
The Illuminator ideal begins with a different understanding of human nature. People are social animals. People need recognition from others if they are to thrive. People long for someone to look into their eyes with loving acceptance.
a lot of parenting is pushing gently against your kid’s traits: encouraging your timid child to try new experiences or teaching your extroverted child to slow down and have some quiet time.
