1: Journalist and author David Brooks was sitting at a bar near his home nursing his bourbon.
“Because the bar was in D.C.,” he writes in How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, “there were three guys at a table behind me talking about elections and swing states.
“I was studying the bartender’s Chinese-character tattoos and drawing all sorts of conclusions about her sad singer/indie rock musical tastes. . .
“The man with his laptop at the table next to them looked like a junior IT officer who worked for a defense contractor. He had apparently acquired his wardrobe from the garage sale after the filming of Napoleon Dynamite.
“Down the bar, there was a couple gazing deeply into their phones.
“Everybody had their eyes open, and nobody seemed to be seeing each other,” he notes.
“And in truth, I was the worst of them, because I was doing that thing I do: the size-up. The size-up is what you do when you first meet someone: You check out their look, and you immediately start making judgments about them.”
David was showing up as what he calls a “Diminisher.” Someone who makes other people feel small. ” They stereotype and ignore. They are so involved with themselves that other people are just not on their radar screen.”
2: There is a better way, David believes. Instead of showing up as Diminishers, we can become Illuminators.
“Being an Illuminator is a way of being with other people, a style of presence, an ethical ideal,” he writes.
“Over the past four years I’ve become determined to learn the skills that go into seeing others, understandings others, making other people feel respected, valued, and safe.”
His goal? ” I want to see people deeply, one by one,” he writes.
“When we attend to others like this, we aren’t simply observing them or analyzing them,” David writes. ” As an Illuminator, we offer a gaze that says, ‘I want to get to know you and be known by you.'”
Our gaze communicates how we feel before we utter a word. When someone meets us, subconsciously, they want to know: Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?
Respect is a gift we give with eyes. “It’s a gaze that says that every person I meet is unique, unrepeatable, and, yes, superior to me in some way,” David writes. Because “every person I meet is fascinating on some topic.”
3: In a prior RiseWithDrew, we outlined some of the characteristics that make it hard to see others: egotism, anxiety, objectivism, and essentialism.
Here are some of the traits of an Illuminator’s gaze:
Trait 1: TENDERNESS: “Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being,” the novelist Olga Tokarczuk declared in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and the sameness between us.”
Trait 2: RECEPTIVITY: “Being receptive means overcoming insecurities and self-preoccupation and opening yourself up to the experience of another,” David writes. ” It means we resist the urge to project our own viewpoint; we do not ask, ‘How would I feel if I were in your shoes?’ Instead, we are patiently ready for what the other person is offering.
Trait 3: ACTIVE CURIOSITY: We inquire. We want to know more. When the novelist Zadie Smith was a girl, she would imagine what it would be like to live in the homes of her friends. ” I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave,” she writes. ” That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.”
“What a fantastic way to train your imagination in the art of seeing others,” David writes.
Trait 4: AFFECTION: “In the parable of the Good Samaritan,” David notes, “an injured Jew lies beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. At least two other Jews, one of them a priest, pass him by, crossing to the other side of the street, not doing anything to help. They see him strictly intellectually.
“Only the Samaritan, a man from an alien and hated people, truly sees him. Only the Samaritan enters into the injured man’s experience and actually does something to help him.
“In these biblical cases, where someone sees another without really seeing, these failures of knowledge are not intellectual failures; they are failures of the heart.”
Trait 5: GENEROSITY: “Dr. Ludwig Guttmann was a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 and found a job in a hospital in Britain that served paraplegics, mostly men injured in the war,” David notes.
“When he first started working there, the hospital heavily sedated these men and kept them confined to their beds. Ludwig, however, didn’t see the patients the way the other doctors saw them. He cut back on the sedatives, forced them out of bed, and started throwing balls at them and doing other things to get them active.”
His fellow doctors disapproved, and Ludwig was summoned to a tribunal.
“These are moribund cripples,” one of the doctors asserted. ” Who do you think they are?”
“They are the best of men,’ Ludwig replied.
“It was his sense of generosity of spirit that changed how he defined them,” David observes. ” He continually organized games, first at the hospital, then for the paraplegics around the nations. In 1960 this led to the Paralympic Games.”
Trait 6: A HOLISTIC ATTITUDE: “A great way to mis-see people is to see only a piece of them,” David notes. ” Some doctors mis-see their patients when they see only their bodies. Some employers mis-see workers when they see only their productivity. We must resist every urge to simplify in this way.”
The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy once wrote: “One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way—said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic and so on.
“People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid.
“Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”
___________________
Of course, we do not show up with these traits in every situation. “Being an Illuminator is an ideal, and one that most of us will fall short of a lot of the time,” David observes.
“But if we try our best to illuminate people with a glowing gaze that is tender, generous, and receptive, we’ll at least be on the right track.”
The educator Parker Palmer once said, “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.”
His insight points to what David calls “a modern answer to an ancient question: How do I become a better person?”
More tomorrow!
_________________________
Reflection: How do I become a better person? What am I committed to doing differently or better?
Action: Journal my answers to the questions above.
What did you think of this post?
