1: “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,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
“Even when we know someone well,” he notes, “I find that if we don’t talk about the little things on a regular basis, it’s hard to talk about the big things.”
Most of the time, we are just living our lives, going about our business.
We’ve got a meeting at work. We have to stop by the pharmacy. A brief conversation with another parent at our kids’ school.
As we are doing all these things, usually there are other people around.
In these moments, we’re “not staring deeply into another’s eyes or unveiling profound intimacies,” he writes. We’re “just doing stuff together—not face-to-face but side by side.”
2: David calls this “accompaniment.”
“When we’re first getting to know someone, we don’t want to try to peer into their souls right away,” he suggests. “It’s best to look at something together. What do you think of the weather, Taylor Swift, gardening, or the TV series The Crown?”
Chatting with another person and just being around them play a critical role in the process of getting to know someone.
“We’re becoming comfortable with each other,” he writes, “and comfort is no small thing. Nothing can be heard in the mind until the situation feels safe and familiar to the body.”
Indeed.
“Accompaniment,” David notes, “is an other-centered way of moving through life. When we’re accompanying someone, we’re in a state of relaxed awareness—attentive and sensitive and unhurried.
“We’re not leading or directing the other person. We’re just riding alongside as they experience the ebbs and flows of daily life.”
Our role is to be present and be open to whatever may happen.
“Our movements are marked not by willfulness but by willingness,” he observes. “We’re willing to let the relationship deepen or not deepen, without forcing it either way. We are acting in a way that lets other people be perfectly themselves.”
3: What is the essential quality of accompaniment? Patience.
“Trust is built slowly,” David writes. “The person who is good at accompaniment exercises what the philosopher Simone Weil called ‘negative effort.’ This is the ability to hold back and be aware of the other person’s timetable.
“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them,” Simone writes.
Some people are “lingerable,” David suggests. “They are the sort of people we 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 other consider lingerable.”
Because before a person will be willing to share personal stuff, they want to know that we will respect their personal stuff.
“Whoever wants life must go softly towards life,” writes D. H. Lawrence, “softly as one would go towards a deer and fawn that are nestling under a tree.
“One gesture of violence, one violent assertion of self-will and life is gone…. But with quietness, with an abandon of self-assertion and a fullness of the deep true self one can approach another human being, and know the delicate best of life, the touch.”
More tomorrow.
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Action: Run an experiment today. Intentionally accompany someone.
Reflection: Afterwards, reflect or journal: How did it go? What did I learn?