The image you carry around with you of each person you know is not that person.

And the image you carry around with you of yourself is not you.

So often, when you relate to others, you’re relating only to the image – a story, a narrative thread woven from glimpses, half-truths, and your own habitual way of accounting for things. You can hardly call it them. If anything, what you’re relating to is more properly part of you.

How huge the distance there is still to cross to have any real sense of the other.

And yet… this capacity to relax your certainty about other people so you can reach them and be reached is one of the great human qualities, if you’re prepared to allow for it. And if you’re ready to find out that, up close, other people are quite different from what you were sure they would be.

Photo Credit: James Marvin Phelps via Compfight cc