I hope that you are well, as well as your family.

I’ve often thought about this very notion that you mention here, that “Anytime you experience something that no one who has not been there can understand, you isolate yourself in small ways from those around you.” We’ve all experienced it in one way or another, and it’s a painful place to be. Although I’ve always thought it was an essential part of life, I’m beginning to believe that, while no one can feel an experience exactly the way we do, we don’t have to be isolated in the experience.

Philosopher Mary Oliver, in her book, “Witnessing: Beyond Recognition,” argues against the Hegelian notion that we come to know who we are based on our differences, which necessarily means a “struggle for recognition.” Oliver asserts that if we realize that we are all connected by the energies that sustain us, and look at identity formation from this view of being already and always connected, our identities aren’t formed in any kind of a antagonistic struggle, but are actually formed by our “witnessing” each other, witnessing for Oliver being defined as the “ability to respond to, and address, others.” It is an ethical obligation, a responsibility, for each of us to witness the other, to respond in a way that allows the other their subjectivity, especially because our own subjectivity is wrapped up in the way that we respond to others and how they respond to us.

I haven’t completely wrapped my head around this theory, but what I believe is that it allows us to respond to the pain in the other without pretending that we know what it feels like or that we even understand it. We just witness it. The possibilities of this paradigm change are so exciting to me because it so changes our relationships with each other. It gives me some hope in a time of not much hope.

I’d recommend this book to everyone. It has some technical language in it, but it is very readable. And I think it’s essential to the future of humanity.