You can judge a book by its cover

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Within 5m of talking to someone, they’ve given you a tremendous amount of information, between posture, costume, patterns of eye contact, level of nervous system activation, along with the words they say. That is, if you listen. When you’re very young it’s difficult to make sophisticated use of this. You’re so full of need, insecurity, and judgement. So this is the dark, lumpy glass you look through.

But as you get a little older and this loosens, you realize how much you can actually see people, how much this is a skill you automatically hone if you remain open and fully, sincerely contact others. This requires sitting in a state of heightened relaxation, an open sensitivity where you are maintaining discernment but not jumping to conclusions based on the first clue you get.

When this becomes your area of interest, anyone is interesting, because they are always revealing something that can help your ongoing study. Someone narrates a professional dispute. They don’t know that they’ve told you about their victim mindset, which likely foreclosed potentially useful options. Another person eagerly narrates a professional success, without hearing the desperate twang in their voice. These details, paradoxically, only reveal themselves when you listen without an evaluative agenda weighing down your perception. It’s not like you see someone tuck their t-shirt and think “daddy issues.” It’s more like you come away from even a brief interaction with hypotheses to disconfirm, areas of ambiguity to explore further.

You’re foolish, of course, if you judge others harshly for these involuntary disclosures, because you realize that this is the way you’ve been perceived by those older and wiser than you, for your entire life. Many times, you’ve walked into a room and started talking and, within five minutes, someone has glimpsed all of your blind spots, laid out as clearly as jars in a spice rack. Of course they didn’t tell you, they correctly ascertained that you weren’t ready to hear their feedback. It can be an act of love and compassion to have faith that someone else will learn the lessons they need to learn. This is “silence that speaks volumes,” a signal that is very hard to listen for.

“Information is the measure of surprise.” The more listening you do, the more you hunt for subtler moments of surprise. Like a connoisseur of some medium, you become familiar with the common structures, such that novel variations please you more.

Over time, you get better at discerning qualities that are hard to fake: embodied wisdom, integrity, hard-earned joy. You start to be attracted—in friendships, in working relationships, in intimate partnership—to these finer qualities, rather than chasing after shiny object people who promise to make up for what you lack. Over time, this organizing principle sorts your life, so that some relationships become unbelievably rich, while others fall away, or fail to form. If you care to, you can start to experience yourself less as an individual and more as a node in something larger that takes shape around you, if you let it.

Simultaneously, you become aware that others are engaging in a similar sorting process, such that the total human network does reward virtue. Sure, some skilled sociopaths run amok. But most of those who are crudely, blatantly power-hungry in the long term lose it, or never gain it in the first place. Those who behave extractively wonder why they end up alone. Eventually, communities find their own level. Almost nobody reaches a position of real respect undeservedly. Famous buffoons don’t get respect from the people they really want it from, just sycophants whose praise is meaningless.

The more you can see this ecologically, the less it’s upsetting or confusing. A sense of wonder takes over. You thought that people were stupid, when you were young and thought yourself precocious. Individuals say dumb things. But there is such intelligence in the interplay, in what resonates versus what dies. You can bear witness without getting hooked on every passing drama. Strangely, this is self-possession: the ability to let others be as they are.

Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.