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

by David Brooks

You’re there to be of help, a faithful presence, open to whatever may come.

marked not by willfulness but by willingness—you’re

You are acting in a way that lets other people be per...

patience.

“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them,”

is decelerating the pace of social life.

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

Personal truths resent approaches that are too aggressive, too intense, too impatient.

Accompaniment is a necessary stage in getting to know a person precisely because it is so gentle and measured.

playfulness.

people are more fully human when they are at play.

bonds that were formed by play.

Laughter

We see each other.

shared experience

Through the rhythms of this kind of play, Gail and Caroline passed through a series of intimacy gradients.

It’s amazing how much you can come to know someone, even before any deep conversations happen.

though we knew each other so well, we had never had a conversation, because he could not yet talk. All of our communication was through play, touch, and glance.

the other-centeredness

adage: Let others voluntarily evolve.

Accompaniment often involves a surrender of power that is beautiful to behold.

think. Pope Paul VI said it wonderfully: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.”

presence.

“A simple human connection between the one who suffers and one who would heal.”

They were there for me, just for a moment, and it was exactly what I needed.”

the ultimate touchstone is witness,

everything in nature is connected with everything else, and that you can understand this if you simply lie back and let that awareness wash over you.

In social life, too, everybody is connected to everybody else by our shared common humanity. Sometimes we need to hitch a ride on someone else’s journey, and accompany them a part of the way.

how different people can experience the same event in profoundly different ways.

Aldous Huxley

“Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

two layers of reality.

there is the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful.

things? How do they construct their reality?”

This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.

it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

that it shows how a person’s whole perspective, his or her way of seeing and interpreting and experiencing the world, can be transformed.

not something that can be consciously controlled.

A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world.

Your mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies, and you live within that construction.

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

Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality.

How are they perceiving this situation?

seeing is not a passive process of receiving data; it’s an active process of prediction and correction.

“Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.” Most of us non-neuroscientists are not aware of all this constructive activity,

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

The universe is a drab, silent, colorless place. I mean this quite literally. There is no such thing as color and sound in the universe; it’s just a bunch of waves and particles. But because we have creative minds, we perceive sound and music, tastes and smells, color and beauty, awe and wonder. All that stuff is in here in your mind, not out there in the universe. —

imagine how much work it has to undertake to construct your identity, your life story, your belief system, your ideals.

Instead, I want to receive you as an active creator. I

I’m going to engage with you.