By Danna Downing
I truly am thankful to be nestled in a community where reading is supported in so many ways: our district library, our very own local bookstore, an active cultural arts center. These critical forces work together to create opportunities such as the recent visiting author visit with Michigan’s own author, Angeline Boulley. This event started a fire of communication between community members, multi-generational groups, and people who want to learn and understand more about indigenous people right here in Michigan.
Seeing and knowing people is the very first step to creating rooms of love in our lives. As I grow older, I see that serendipity often fosters little miracles in my life. The reading of “Firekeeper’s Daughter”, written by Angeline Boulley, combined with reading “Hannah Coulter,” by Wendell Berry and recommended by a friend, influenced me to also pick up a book written by David Brooks. The name of that book is “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen”. David Brooks has spent his life interviewing thousands of people around the world and can speak with authority. He also embraces his own mortality and humility. That ranks him as an expert in my mind.
At this stage of life, I fully agree with Brooks that the most significant thing a person can achieve is to “take the lessons of life, the hard knocks of life, the surprises of life, and the mundane realities of life and use them to refine their own consciousness so they can gradually come to see the world with more understanding, more wisdom, more humanity, and more grace.” I believe a goal like this can help us find a more rewarding way of life.
Brooks is a realist, and he quickly acknowledges this way of life is built, not just found. His book gives us the tools to think about and develop a path for improving our relationships and our life satisfaction. In Berry’s book, the narrator, Hannah Coulter, calls this place a room of love.
I will attempt to share a few of the many gems that Brooks offers in his guide to entice you to read more about this fascinating topic.
- He tells us that there are roughly 8 billion people on Earth and each one sees the world in their own way neurologically, a way that scientists tell us is never repeated. No wonder understanding others is a challenge and full of surprises.
- He gives examples of how many times we cannot understand our own personal truth until we say it aloud to someone else. If we are not having meaningful conversations, how can we learn about ourselves?
- He asks us to go back in time and list people with whom we felt seen and valued; and then re-visit the feelings that gave us. It is an amazing process and reminds us of the people that make life worth living.
- He teaches us how to ask good questions in our social lives that will raise the odds of finding a new friend. Who doesn’t need another friend?
And, finally, I will the quote ultimate wisdom of Hannah Coulter, to warm your heart and inspire you to hang in there, growing our faith in others and ourselves. In her relationship with her husband, the making of their “together place” ruled over all. There were rough times, of course, but she learned that when the gentleness she knew in him seemed to be calling out, it allowed her gentleness to answer back, allowing them to move beyond any hurt or disappointment.
“You can’t get there by just wanting to, or just because the night falls. The meeting of minds is prepared in the work of years and the keeping of faith, in kindness. The room of love is another world. You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock. It is a world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds for it contains the longing of all things to be together, and to be at rest together. You come together to the day’s end, weary and sore, troubled and afraid. You take it all into your arms and it goes away, and there you are where giving and taking are the same and you live a little while entirely in the gift.”
Happy holidays, everyone!
