The Call to Witness
A delayed review of the best book I read in 2023
I am beginning to share these posts more broadly, to engage others in discussion and community on how to practice the art of being human in a frenetic, disenchanted age. If you appreciate a reflection, please consider sharing it. They will remain free. Thank you and may you all be seen in the ways you are striving to live a good life in the time you are given.
Most of us walk blindly within the roles we inhabit. Our purpose in the role seems so obvious, so core to why chose that path, that it doesn’t merit conscious reflection.
As professionals, our purpose, we assume, is to be a Master, to pursue excellence in whatever project is in front of us. As leaders and parents, we see several purposes. We are Guardians, ensuring that our charges (organizations, staff, children) are safe and have enough money. We are Captains, constantly pointing to the bright of horizon of growth for our teams and our families and steering them towards it through the many storms and shoals. We are Soothers, comforting everyone after the inevitable falls and assuring them that we will all rise again towards something better.
But what about Witnesses? How many of us arrive at work or the school carpool lane thinking my purpose here is to see these people as clearly and fully as possible? For those of us that do, where do we prioritize witnessing compared to those other hats we wear? How much attention and energy do we devote to witnessing compared to fundraising or recruiting or planning summer vacations?
For much of my life, it was unthinkable that I would place the vague notion of seeing people near these other, “more serious” priorities. Lamenting and gently reshaping that common bias is the animating force behind David Brooks’ beautiful new book “How to Know a Person.”
Like most of Brooks’ work, it is a book about the hard art of being human. But it is also one of the best books on leadership and parenting that I have ever read. We may assume that witnessing is for therapists and chaplains. But I believe all of us responsible for stewarding other humans are called to witness well.
Seeing is Thriving
To be witnessed, to be fully seen with all our aspirations and struggles, our triumphs and fears, is one the greatest needs we all have in this brief life. So, to truly witness others, Brooks writes, is one of the greatest gifts we can give. It is the foundation of love and compassion.
We should witness people for its own sake, to help them feel that every piece of them, their beauty and brokenness alike, matters amid the callous darkness that engulfs too much of the world. But witnessing is also a foundation of growth, of thriving. As Brooks notes: “there is something in being seen that brings out growth. If you beam the light of your attention on me, I blossom.” It may be strange to think of witnessing as a central task of a leader. But what greater purpose do we have than to help our organizations, our teams, our children grow to their full potential?
Brooks opens the book by chronicling the many ways we all fail to witness. We oversimplify, judge, and ignore the people in our lives, usually because of our own insecurity and anxiety. These failures have real impact. As Iris Murdoch wrote, “because we don’t see people accurately, we treat them wrongly.” When we don’t witness people, we cast them aside, tell them that their pain and their prayer doesn’t matter.
In this way, we can see the spiraling polarization, anxiety, and depression of recent decades as a collective failure to witness. Most, if not all, of the great wisdom traditions emphasized witnessing—and the compassion and forgiveness that flows from it—at the core of their teaching and built communal structures around it. As those traditions receded from our culture, so did the idea of witness as virtue. Where were those of us who grew along a radically secular path encouraged or taught to witness? Rather than hold our gaze outwards, we were too often compelled to anxiously lock our eyes on to our own achievements and failures. And so the vicious spiral steepened: without others’ witness, we feel more alone and inadequate and try to fill the void by clawing after more success, status, and wealth. Caught in that feverish, Sisyphean quest, we then cannot witness others struggling in their own confusion and darkness.
Most of the leadership challenges I encounter in my role as an executive coach flow from similar failures to witness. I frequently support leaders through the hard, messy moments when someone on their team is struggling. Too often, leaders rush through one-on-one meetings, focusing on the details of project deliverables, or engage in difficult discussions through text and email. They are then surprised and disappointed when that key team member is floundering months later. Without true witness, that person isn’t given the full support to grow into their role. Without true witness, the leader can’t see and name that the role is not a fit for where the person is in their development journey, harming both them and the organization. They struggle in the shadows until either they leave or the leader summons—painfully late—the courage to let them go.
The tales of parental failures to witness are as old as time. It seems almost universal that we feel unseen by our parents and families as teenagers at some point. I have deeply struggled with and finally accepted that I will inevitably wound my kids in some way through my blindness and inattention. But there is still a wide spectrum of how well we can see our children at every point in their evolution.
The Art of Witnessing
How do we truly witness others? We all spend time with and listen to our teams and children and friends. We obviously see them at some level. What more do we need to do?
Brooks focuses on this question through the remainder of the book. As with most elements of the art of being human, the answers are simple in theory and fiendishly hard in practice.
Witnessing is hard because of the core paradox that novelist Frederick Buechner captures well: “What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we fear more than anything else." That fear means that true, artful witnessing must be slow and gentle and compassionate. We cannot bang out witnessing like a Powerpoint deck or microwaved dinner. We must create and hold space for deeper, more sacred connection. And we must overcome our own fear of being seen in all our brokenness and imperfection.
Like any art, there are too many nuances of witnessing for me to do justice to here. But four themes clearly emerge from the book:
1. Have the right mindset about people – We can only witness if we have a clear worldview of what humans are. We all, as Whitman said, contain multitudes. We are all far more than the layers of armor we wear. We are all broken. If we hold this view, resisting the calls of our dualistic mind to make snap, self-protective judgments, we get curious about what someone contains in their depths. Importantly, this requires holding the paradox that each person is both entirely unique and is shaped by their inheritance (ancestry, race, class, etc.). Much of our current cultural turmoil is a struggle to hold that paradox. For too long, marginalized communities’ inheritance of exploitation and abuse went unseen, extending its echoes into present biases and inequalities. To correct that failure, our culture now too often swings to the other side, quickly defining people by their group identity and inheritance and failing to honor them in their complex, messy individuality. To truly witness someone, we must look at them through what Brooks calls “double vision:” as a bearer of all that has been handed to them, and as a shaper of their own path through life.
2. Create the time and space – There are no shortcuts for witnessing. Most of the skills that Brooks illuminates are slower, both to develop and practice, than most of us are comfortable with. Many people reading this are probably thinking “witnessing is nice and all, but how on earth can I create the time for it when my schedule is already so hectic?” The simple answer is: because the cost is so great. Failing to witness candidates and team members creates many painful months of poor performance and difficult separations. Failing to witness our children leads to struggle and depression and disconnection. Failing to witness leaves us lonely and isolated in this one brief life we have. Witnessing is an investment, and like any good investment it takes patience. We know we spend many hours on far less important tasks; we just need to summon the courage to push them aside and turn our attention to witnessing.
3. Ask the right questions and truly listen – Much of the art of witnessing that Brooks narrates lies in asking and then gently following questions that don’t emerge naturally from most of us. Here are a few he highlights:
a. How has your suffering shaped you?
b. How do your ancestors show up in your life?
c. What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
Once we ask these questions, we need to truly listen. We need to fasten our attention to the person through often slow and winding answers though our phone is buzzing and our mind desperately wants to turn to the passive-aggressive email we received earlier that day. It is partly because holding our attention is so difficult in this age that witnessing is such a precious gift.
4. Set the self aside – Ego, of course, is a principal impediment to witnessing. We can’t see others clearly when we are scanning desperately for ways to soothe our fears and insecurities. Brooks maps out a series of “tasks” or levels of consciousness that we are all called to over our lives. The evolution through those tasks is so important, especially for leaders, that I will delve into them into a later reflection. In short, however, it is the final two stages that we begin to focus beyond ourselves, that we finally feel that our little vessel of self is enough and we can pour our attention outwards. This is when our capacity for witnessing blossoms. But it would be too simplistic to conclude that young people cannot and should not witness; hard-earned wisdom helps, but any of us can choose to relax our egos and invest in deeply knowing someone else.
Most of us will fail at these pillars of witnessing more often than we succeed. After all, we are just as fallible and broken as those we are trying to know. Even Brooks, who has devoted years to understanding this art, openly admits that he will at times revert to blabbing on about himself when he should be asking deep questions. But, oh, when we do succeed. I hope you have had those moments, and that you will have many more. There are few greater feelings in this life.
This book landed at a moment when I finally embraced that witnessing is my central calling. I have loved being a builder, a leader, an advocate. But on receiving the news of my death, I hope that the first response of many people I have shared this life with is: “he saw me in all that I am.”
May we learn to set aside all that distracts us from each other,
May we peel away the layers of armor that protect us from seeing and being seen,
May we linger to explore the beauty and brokenness of everyone in our lives,
May we be witnessed in all that we are and all that we carry.