Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - Can I See Through Another's Eyes ? - Daily Wisdom

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Welcome Back to Daily Wisdom.Each of us moves through life inside a world built from our own history, our fears, the things that once hurt us and the ones we are still hoping for. A word that means nothing to you can land on someone's oldest wound, and a small kindness you barely noticed can be the thing that holds their whole day together.More resources: Free resources, books and more on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://wordsoftaoism.com/⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠My Substack Blog:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://taoismteachings.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Music I use, as a playlist:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome back to Daily Wisdom. This is the third piece in our series on how we meet other people. And after looking at the stories we tell about them and the art of listening, it reaches for the thing all of that has been aiming at. Can I really see through another's eyes? You have probably compared memories with someone and found you did not live the same event at all.

The dinner you remember as warm, they remember as tense, the remark you have forgotten entirely, they have carried for years. You are in the same room, breathing the same air, and each of you walked away from a different evening. It is quietly disorienting. This proof that the people closest to us live in a world that only partly overlaps with ours.

Each of us moves through life inside a world built from our own history, our fears, the things that once hurt us, and the ones we are still hoping for. A word that means nothing to you can land on someone's oldest wound, and a small kindness you barely noticed can be the thing that holds their whole day together. We forget this constantly, judging other people's reactions by the size they would have in our world rather than the size they have in theirs.

So we call someone oversensitive or cold or dramatic when we are simply standing in the wrong world to understand them. Here is the honest difficulty worth naming before we pretend this is easy. We can never actually get inside. another person. We cannot feel firsthand what it is like to be them, with their memories and their particular history pressing on this exact moment. There's a real wall there, and any talk of empathy that ignores it rings a little false. There's an old story from the Towers thinker Jwongzi that sits right on that wall. He is crossing a bridge with a friend, watching the fish dart in

the river below, and he says, look how the fish are enjoying themselves. That is their happiness. His friend objects at once. You are not a fish, so how could you know what makes a fish happy? And Zhuangzi answers, gently, you're not me, so how do you know that I do not know? The friend has logic on his side.

Strictly speaking, Zhuanzi can't know the inner life of a fish. just as none of us can climb fully inside another person. And yet Zhuangzi, leaning over the water, caught in the darting aliveness of those small bodies, is doing something the logic misses entirely. He is reaching, letting himself be drawn out of his own vantage point toward another creature's experience,

and that leaning toward is the whole of what empathy is. It was never a claim to know another's mind for certain, only the generous effort to picture it anyway. This changes what we are even trying to do. To see through another's eyes is to take seriously that their inside is as real and as full as your own, and to let your imagination travel there. It is the difference between thinking, I would not be upset. by that, so they should not be either, and wondering instead, what did that touch in them that it does not touch in me? The first stays locked in your own world, the second lays down the first plank of a bridge toward theirs. This is hardest exactly where we need it most

in the middle of conflict. When two people argue, each is certain of being the reasonable one, because each looks out from inside a world where their own reaction makes perfect sense. And from in there, the other can seem stubborn or unfair, almost by definition. The quickest way out is rarely to prove your own world more thoroughly. It is to step even briefly into theirs and to let them feel that you have, because a person who feels understood stops fighting, simile. simply to be seen. Think of the last time someone reacted in a way that struck you as out of all proportion. And the quick verdict rose that they were overreacting. Imagine just for a moment that the reaction

was exactly the right size for something you cannot see. Some earlier version of this moment, they have already lived a hundred times before you arrived. You do not. need the details to grant that they exist. Allowing that there is a reason, hidden from you but real to them, soften something, and you find yourself standing beside the person rather than against them, both of you, looking at the thing that hurt. Seeing through another's eyes still leaves you free to disagree, and it never asks you to excuse harm or to pretend you. can read a mind. You can imagine your way towards someone's experience and hold your own ground entirely. The point is only to stop treating your own view as the single true measure of a world

that everyone around you is quietly living in their own way. In practice, the move is small, mostly a question you turn inward. When someone puzzles or frustrates you, ask quietly what this might look like from where they're standing and what they could be carrying that you cannot see from here. You can also ask them, which we forget is even allowed. A plain and curious, what was that like for you? And then actually wait for the answer.

imagination does a great deal on its own and sometimes the bridge is built simply by asking so the next time you're sure that someone is just wrong to feel the way they feel you might remember the fish under the bridge and the man leaning far out over the water reaching for a life he could never fully enter and reaching all the same

We do not have to become another person to honor what it is like to be them. We only have to lean a little further past our own edge than we usually dare. And to trust that the world on the other side is every bit as real and every bit as inhabited as ours.