The most valuable lesson I learned about myself was detachment. Not because it was unattainable, but because I searched for it in the wrong place. I sought it in contempt, inhabiting the rigid posture of one who yearns for imperturbability and self control. I sought it in indifference, cultivated as a virtue in a sincere effort to silence the ego. It was in neither of the two, it was in understanding. And understanding, I discovered, is a much more silent and enduring path than all that I conquered with dramatic gestures or the staging of self sufficiency. It is born of profound empathy, of the authentic encounter where we recognize the humanity of the other, knowing that the shadows and lights they project upon us come from their own unconscious abysses. Because others always see us through something. No one comes to us with clear eyes. This is not an immutable judgment, it is the reflection of the history of the one who sees us. There is yet a second layer, more fleeting and treacherous, which is the emotional state of the moment. The same person, on the same day, may find us generous in the morning and threatening in the afternoon, depending on what happened to them between one coffee and another. We have not changed at all. It was they who walked down a........

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