Seek to Understand
My New Year's resolution is to get better at understanding others, understanding information, and understanding myself.
I was at a Catholic wedding about a month ago and something the priest, Father Joe, said during the homily—the part of the religious ceremony where the priest speaks openly to the attendees—has been rattling around in my brain since then. He said, “Grant so much not to be understood but to understand.” On the surface, it sounds so simple as to be almost trite and condescending, but I want to talk about why it’s not. It’s pervasive and applies to how we act in endless circumstances in daily life, with real consequences, which is why I decided to make “Seek to understand, rather than be understood” my New Year’s resolution. In my experience, resolutions and intentions work best when they are formulated around either creating good habits or breaking bad habits. So let me break down what I mean by “seek to understand.”
Despite 12 years of Catholic school I’m not religious at all, but I do have a basic grasp of the Bible. After some poking around, I realized Father Joe was not citing the Bible but the Prayer of St. Francis, which is a prayer for peace. You can’t have peace without understanding. And of course, during this wedding, the plea for understanding was meant as advice to the bride and groom, which is a good place to start when beginning a life together.
Understanding is often thought of and portrayed as a means to an end. The goal is to do something with our understanding. It is surely the case that understanding is a prerequisite to action, to actually doing things, but it can also be an end unto itself. Sometimes it is rewarding and valuable simply to gain a deeper understanding of how the world works, or what interests us. It makes us feel good to listen intently to someone we care about and gain a deeper connection with them via a deeper understanding of their experiences and mindsets. However, it can be challenging to keep in mind. We don’t get paid simply to understand things. Even teachers get paid to teach, not to know. In our fast-paced, “hot take”-driven world, spending time understanding can feel like a waste.
I want to hit on three types of understanding: Understanding other people, understanding information and understanding yourself. The lines between them are blurry and they all overlap but I think it’s a helpful framework for thinking about the areas I want to improve.
When you are having a conversation with someone, are you really listening? Or are you checking your phone or thinking about what you want to eat next, or even what you want to say next? Even if you are 100% focused on what someone is saying, language is complex. There’s body language, various connotations, definitions of the same words, and other linguistic markers, like voice pitch, that can modify what someone means. And what someone says is not always what they mean. People have varying levels of skill at simply communicating in everyday life. In this context, “seeking understanding” means listening intently without distraction and using critical thinking skills to truly understand what someone is saying. There’s a lot going on there! It requires being present in the moment and single-tasking (as opposed to multitasking).
Understanding is an active process. Just passively listening to someone, or taking in information, is not really understanding. It’s just hearing. This isn’t limited to interpersonal communication, either. The same focus and critical thinking applies to watching movies or TV shows, reading, listening to podcasts or music—really any activity at all where there’s some conveyance of information, even if the “information” is musical notes of a song. Social media is rife with people engaged in bad faith interpretations, but even worse is that everyone wants to pontificate and demonstrate an understanding of things to build their brand. They are reading, but not necessarily understanding.
This tension between understanding and wanting to be understood is admittedly acute for myself. I studied journalism and philosophy in college and until the very end, it was a toss up which path I was going to choose. They are both disciplines where you observe the world, interpret events, and then regurgitate them for others. Both journalists and philosophers are expected to make connections and draw conclusions for an audience. In both cases, at least professionally, it’s the end product—the regurgitation or synthesis and subsequent presentation of information and analysis on which the journalist or philosopher is judged by one’s peers. This creates a tension between the understanding and the producing that, speaking for myself, can be hard to manage. There’s a pressure to produce and produce and produce. There’s a real incentive and urge to shoot from the hip, and it can be very profitable to peddle nonsense.
But of course, this isn’t unique to any one career. It’s just part of being human. I’m sure everyone reading this has had the anxiety, irritation, or frustration of someone else getting credit for an idea or something that they had first. I’m not even talking about someone stealing an idea or anything improper—just someone stating an interesting fact and your first reaction being “Oh yeah, I know that.” It’s a normal thing to want validation for the things we know. We want people to think we are smart. It feels good. It’s also just normal to want to share things in the hope that someone else will derive as much joy and pleasure from that knowledge as we do. And we should share what we learn and tell stories. I’m just saying that I think understanding tends to get lost in the shuffle.
I have this habit where I just like to force some random fact into a conversation just because I want to tell people about it. The other day in a group chat with some of my buddies, we were talking about how absolutely shit the Browns and Giants have been this season. Lately, when not watching the Browns implode, I’ve been watching a lot about Norse culture. There was a gap in the convo, so I said, “Did you guys know that like half our days of the week are named after Norse1 gods? Like Tuesday is Tyre’s Day, Wednesday is Woden’s (Odin) Day, Thursday is Thor’s Day, and Friday is Frigg’s Day.”
Why did I share that? Because I think it’s cool and it’s fun to share knowledge and facts and stuff. But I wouldn’t have known that at all if I hadn’t watched a lecture about the Norse, which is another aspect of “understanding”: Just knowing stuff is cool! There’s a huge, enormous world, and there’s so much cool stuff to learn, and learning is how we grow. Keeping with the Catholic theme today, one of my favorite quotes is “Growth is the only evidence of life,” which was said by Cardinal John Henry Newman2. His point was that we’re always moving, improving, learning, until we die. There is no end of the road. There may be goal posts and mile markers, but it never ends.
Nothing I’ve said here is groundbreaking. When I was writing this essay and trying to find what the priest was citing, I discovered that one of Stephen Covey’s popular “7 Steps of Highly Effective People” is to “seek to understand then to be understood.” I can imagine how some might roll their eyes at the notion of practicing understanding, but in almost any field, it’s essential. Good salespeople generally are very good at understanding what their customers want, which enables them to give it to them. Bill Belichick, probably the greatest football coach of all time, is famous for listening to his players in games to better understand what they are seeing on the field to inform the adjustments he makes.
So there’s understanding other people and there’s understanding information. Most importantly, though, is understanding yourself. What is the source of your emotions? How are they tied to your thoughts? Asking yourself, “Why did I lose my temper? Could I have listened better there?” These are hard questions and sometimes we don’t have the answers. But the attempt to understand is key, because only then can we grow in our understanding. And sometimes we might discover we need help, and that’s okay and good. Maybe you don’t understand why you can’t control your temper or feel sad all the time, and you decide to see a therapist. Maybe you realize you can’t understand something at work, so you ask a coworker or peer for advice. These realizations only come from a dedication to understanding yourself and avoiding the hubris that who you are and why you do things is self-evident.
Understanding is essentially about developing and sharpening empathy, which seems to me to be the bedrock of the human condition. As we are social creatures that are basically useless on our own, it’s empathy that allows us to recognize, in various degrees, the shared experience of all humanity. It allows us to collaborate and help each other. With empathy comes progress and growth; without it comes conflict and stagnation.
There’s an irony to writing about understanding. As I wrote in my opening Rhapsody essay, I think writing is a kind of learning. It helps to organize one’s thoughts. Writing publicly, I think, makes learning a collaborative process where readers can build upon anything I had written and add to it, maybe correct it, maybe incorporate it into their own worldview. If Rhapsody has two main themes it’s that one, empathy is key to human flourishing, and two, growth is necessary for human flourishing. Number three might be: Understanding is essential for empathy and growth.
Technically speaking, I'm referring to Germanic gods. Pre-christian England and who we today call the Vikings, or Norse, shared many of the same myths. Where the Norse had Odin, the english had Woden, for example.
There’s evidence to support Newman’s claim. One of the things that seems to separate inanimate from animate objects is that inanimate objects tend toward entropy, where as animate objects tend to be negentropic. In other words, inanimate objects tend toward chaos and randomness, where as animate objects “…actively maintain and elaborate themselves. That is, it seems to be the very essence of organisms, while alive, to work to preserve and extend their structure and complexity, rather than to move toward entropy. (Bartley, 1987; Mayr 1982; Shrödinger 1944).” Richard Ryan & Edward Deci, Self-Determination Theory, Guilford Press, 2017
Thanks for this thoughtful reminder of what matters most.