1: “If you ever saw the old movie Fiddler on the Roof, you know how warm and emotional Jewish families can be. They are always hugging, singing, dancing, laughing, and crying together,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
But that wasn’t David’s family.
“I come from the other kind of Jewish family,” he writes. “We were reserved, stiff-upper-lip types.”
The best phrase to capture the culture of his upbringing?
“Think Yiddish, act British.”
Not that he had a bad childhood. Not at all.
“Home was a stimulating place for me, growing up,” he remembers. “There was love in the home. We just didn’t express it.”
When David was four, his nursery school teacher told his parents, “David doesn’t always play with the other children. A lot of the time, he stands off to the side and observes them.”
He notes: “Whether it was nature or nurture, a certain aloofness became part of my personality.”
When he was a high school senior, “the admissions officers at Columbia, Wesleyan, and Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago,” David writes. “I love my alma mater, and it has changed a lot for the better since I was there, but back then it wasn’t exactly the sort of get-in-touch-with-your-feelings place that would help thaw my emotional ice age.”
If we had met David ten years out of college, he predicts: “I think you would have found me a pleasant enough guy, cheerful but a tad inhibited—not somebody who was easy to get to know or who found it easy to get to know you.”
He took pride in being “a practiced escape artist,” he notes. “When other people revealed some vulnerable intimacy to me, I was good at making meaningful eye contact with their shoes and then excusing myself to keep a vitally important appointment with my dry cleaner.”
2: His ability to repress his feelings became his default mode of living life.
“I suppose I was driven by the usual causes,” he writes, “fear of intimacy; an intuition that if I really let my feelings flow, I wouldn’t like what bubbled up; a fear of vulnerability; and a general social ineptitude.”
Still, David wanted to connect with others. He just didn’t know how.
“Life has a way of tenderizing you, though,” he writes.
“Becoming a father was an emotional revolution, of course. Later, I absorbed my share of the blows that any adult suffers: broken relationships, public failures, the vulnerability that comes with getting older. The ensuing sense of my own frailty was good for me, introducing me to deeper, repressed parts of myself.”
Then, one evening, David was invited to sit on a panel at the Public Theater in New York, the company that would later launch the musical Hamilton.
“I think we were supposed to talk about the role of the arts in public life,” he recalls. “The actress Anne Hathaway was on the panel with me, along with a hilarious and highbrow clown named Bill Irwin and a few others.
“At this panel, D.C. think-tank rules didn’t apply. Backstage, before the panel, everybody was cheering each other on. We gathered for a big group hug. We charged out into the theater filled with camaraderie and purpose. Hathaway sang a moving song. There were tissues on the stage in case anybody started crying.
“The other panelists started emoting things. They talked about magical moments when they were undone, transported, or transformed by some artwork or play.
“Even I started emoting things! As my hero Samuel Johnson might have said, it was like watching a walrus trying to figure skate—it wasn’t good, but you were impressed that you were seeing it at all.
“Then, after the panel, we celebrated with another group hug. I thought, ‘This is fantastic! I’ve got to be around theater people more!’ I vowed to alter my life.”
In reality, David’s change was a bit more gradual. “But over the years, I came to realize that living in a detached way is, in fact, a withdrawal from life and an estrangement not just from other people but from yourself.”
3: So, David embarked on a journey. “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.”
“We writers work out our stuff in public, of course, so I wrote books on emotion, moral character, and spiritual growth.
“And it kind of worked. Over the years, I altered my life. I made myself more vulnerable with people and more emotionally expressive in public.
“I tried to become the sort of person people would confide in—talk with me about their divorces, their grief over the death of their spouse, worries about their kids.
“Gradually, things began to change inside. I had these novel experiences: ‘What are these tinglings in my chest? Oh, they’re feelings!’ One day, I’m dancing at a concert: ‘Feelings are great!’ Another day, I’m sad that my wife is away on a trip: ‘Feelings suck!'”
His goals for his life also changed.
“When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable,” he notes, “but as I got older, I wanted to be wise. Wise people don’t just possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.”
David’s book How to Know a Person summarizes what he’s learned in his quest to be wise and connect with others on a deeper level.
More tomorrow!
______________________________
Reflection: How do I relate to David’s journey of learning the skills to see and understand others while making other people feel respected, valued, and safe?
Action: Journal about my reflections on David’s quest to connect with others more deeply.