“It Is Only with the Heart That One Can See Rightly. What Is Essential Is Invisible to the Eye”

It Is Only with the Heart That One Can See Rightly. What Is Essential Is Invisible to the Eye.

Antoine De Saint Exupery

The Little Prince

 

COVID tells us to keep our distance from one another, that if we get too close we could become fatally ill. We keep our distance from each other when we wrap our political and social beliefs around ourselves like a threadbare coat in winter. These beliefs, this righteous indignation, this black and white thinking does not help us feel better, it does the opposite. It makes us feel more isolated as we ache for well-being.

When we just listen to words without seeing the heart of the speaker, we cannot see their humanity. And we cannot see our own.

A man recently told me that he tries to speak with people who have different beliefs than his so that he can learn about their thinking. And then he asked: “how can I talk with someone who believes that I eat babies.”

I quoted the little Prince and I said “just try to imagine how much fear that person lives with every hour of every day.” It is in that fear, that vulnerability that we find our mutual humanity.

When he talked about this paranoid thinking, I flashed back to one of my first patients I saw as a psychologist. It was on a locked unit and Norma had what’s called catatonic schizophrenia that caused her to hold strange postures for long periods of time. This, in addition to her disturbed thinking.

Talk therapy went nowhere, mostly because of how woefully uninformed I was. But we met several times a week and developed a kind of relationship. A couple of months later I brought my infant daughter to that unit to show her off to my colleagues. As everyone gathered around in the hallway, I saw Norma out of the corner of my eye as she was pasturing in the day room. She looked over and saw me holding the baby and came over to me and wordlessly put her arms out wanting to hold my daughter. I put her in Norma’s arms and she held her gently, sweetly and lovingly. Then she gave Alison back to me.

When we turn our backs on the humanity of others, something inside of us withers. Indeed, it is only with the heart that one can see rightly.