The Forgotten Art of Seeing Each Other

I was at the coffee shop while on vacation in Europe yesterday when I overheard it again—that familiar refrain about “those people” taking what “we” deserve. The speaker wasn’t wealthy, and wasn’t particularly privileged in any visible way. Just someone who had learned to see scarcity where there might be abundance, competition where there could be community.

It made me think of a friend’s mother’s attitude. No matter how little she had, there was always room for one more. “We make the soup stretch,” she’d say, adding water and finding another vegetable. Not because she was a saint, but because she remembered what it meant to need that seat at someone’s table.

Somewhere along the way, many of us have forgotten this simple truth: we’re all just walking each other home. Every single one of us is vulnerable in our own ways, carrying invisible wounds, hoping for kindness when we stumble.

I think about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of struggle. How much easier it is to point at someone else—someone who looks different, speaks differently, arrived here differently—and say, “There’s the reason things are hard.” It’s the oldest sleight of hand: making us look at each other with suspicion instead of looking up at systems that benefit from our division.

Last month, I watched a man at the grocery store counting change for milk and bread. The woman behind him shifted impatiently, muttering about “people who don’t work.” She couldn’t see his construction worker’s boots, worn down at the heels. Couldn’t know he might have been laid off three weeks ago. We see what we expect to see, what we’ve been taught to see.

But here’s what breaks my heart: the woman muttering was buying the store brand everything, clipping coupons with worried fingers. She and the man with the change were in the same boat, just sitting in different seats, each convinced the other was somehow capsizing them.

When did we start believing that compassion was a limited resource? That helping someone else somehow diminishes us? My Irish mother would have called it “the stranger’s blessing”—the idea that what we offer to others returns to us in ways we can’t predict or control. Not karma exactly, but an understanding that we’re all part of the same fabric. Pull one thread, and eventually, you feel the tug.

I remember volunteering at a food bank where a well-dressed woman came in, tears streaming. “I never thought I’d be here,” she whispered. The volunteer next to me—who I knew had been a client himself two years earlier—simply said, “None of us did. But here we are, taking care of each other.” That’s the truth we keep forgetting: we’re all just one illness, one layoff, one unexpected crisis from needing that outstretched hand.

The real privilege isn’t wealth—though that helps. It’s the privilege of forgetting our shared vulnerability. Of believing we’ve earned our safety through merit alone, rather than recognizing the thousand graces and helping hands that brought us to this moment.

There’s a poem by Rumi that says, “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” What if we traded our certainty about who deserves what for curiosity about each other’s stories? What if we replaced judgment with wonder at how anyone manages to keep going in this difficult world?

I don’t mean to sound naive. The fears are real—costs keep rising, and the future feels uncertain. But when has turning against each other ever made any of us safer? When has closing our hearts actually protected them?

Sometimes I practice a simple exercise: when I catch myself thinking “those people,” I pause and substitute “us.” Those people struggling to find work become us struggling to find work. Those people seeking safety become us seeking safety. It’s a small shift, but it changes everything. Suddenly, I’m not defending some fortress of deservedness. I’m simply recognizing fellow travelers on a difficult road.

The mystics knew something we’ve forgotten: we are each other. Not metaphorically, but actually. Your suffering is mine, your joy is mine, because we’re all notes in the same song. When we refuse to care for each other, we’re not protecting ourselves—we’re diminishing the very thing that makes us human.

So maybe today, when we hear that familiar chorus about who deserves what, we can remember my friend’s mother’s kitchen table. How there was always room for one more, not because resources were infinite, but because isolation was the real poverty. How the soup got thinner but the laughter got richer. How everyone who sat there knew they might be the one needing that seat tomorrow.

We’re all more fragile than we pretend. We’re all more connected than we admit. And in the end, as someone wise once said, we have nothing if we don’t have love. Not the greeting card kind, but the tough, daily choice to see each other as worth protecting, worth helping, worth believing in.

The stranger at the gate isn’t stealing your bread. They’re reminding you that we’re all strangers somewhere, all guests at tables we didn’t set, all dependent on kindness we didn’t earn.

That’s not weakness. That’s the beginning of wisdom. It’s belonging.

Reflection Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham