When We Pay Witness, The Story Isn't Ours To Resolve

Image by author

We can see ourselves in everything. We can mirror everything, too. For example, I can see myself in the stately oak tree in my front yard. Both of us are established and upright, yet hazy-wavy in the humid breeze.

Likewise, I can mirror my husband when his voice rises with the demonstrative arts of a perturbed bear. My voice becomes his in due time, and eventually, where there was one bear there are now two.

It’s one thing to mirror or mimic. This helps me to dance with my situation, learn endless things, or grow empathy and trust. It also enables me to become a huffy bear.

But things get sticky when I assume I know what’s behind someone’s smile or bearish voice. I know why I smile in a particular situation or why I get agitated. A seamless path to your whys would be to assume they’re like mine. Since my truths seem so true they must be the truth. This can get me into all kinds of crazy trouble.

You’d think it’d be obvious to me that Bear Husband is different than Bear Me. Our lives have been different. We are different. But my kneejerk response is to see myself in him and his world as mine.

We’ve been together for thirty-some years, so there’ve been plenty of times when I didn’t step away from me to stand there as a simple witness to him. When I remembered to step away, it was a beautiful thing and the bears disappeared. The cycle of your-bear-is-my-bear stopped in its tracks.

One of the hardest things for me to learn over the years has been to pay witness to someone else. I used to think helping was solving, and that solving was cut and dry. If I see myself when I look at you, imagine how easy it would be to solve your problems. I could fling over my ready-made solutions.

But helping many times isn’t about solving. It’s about paying witness. It’s akin to that old “give a man a fish versus teaching him to fish” adage. Solving for someone is giving the fish. Paying witness is teaching to fish because you’re modeling for the person how to solve: pay witness to ourselves and listen with no judgment. This opens the curious mind to better options.

If it sounds easy, it isn’t. It’s a skill and a dance with whatever you’re witnessing — the good, the bad, the ugly. It’s easier to hand out a few fish and wrap things up. It’s also what many of us are trained to do throughout life.

I wonder if the fact that humans are story manufacturing plants has anything to do with wanting to hand out fish. We have fine-tuned ways of making stories all day long. We evolved to do it. We’re driven to do it. We love A + B = C. Above all, we like to get to “C” fast.

Our system is glitchy, though, because our stories don’t require veracity. They care about two fundamental things — conflict and resolution —and they teach essential lessons to help us deal with difficulty. We craft quick stories about the unknowns in our daily lives.

“So-and-so just did something aggressive. It must be because they’re mad at me. I’d better steer clear or fight back.”

We don’t know more than what we observe. Yet, we diagnose, define, and categorize because this allows us to craft a story fast. I get it. I don’t see this as lazy, careless, or cruel as much as our solution to living in the dark.

Making stories up on the fly often seems like our best option, but it’s not — unless things are dire, which is hardly ever the case.

The more I learn about the art of listening without assuming, the more I see how much of a small miracle it is.

Imagine this:

You walk into the hair salon or barbershop to get your hair cut. They seat you with Angie who seems professional at first, but then she gets distracted. You start to wonder. You begin to make your story.

As the two of you figure out how Angie will cut your hair, you notice she keeps looking out the big front window, as if she’s looking for someone or something. Maybe she’s not so professional after all. Maybe she’s distracted. Maybe she’s into shady stuff. Maybe she just broke up with her boyfriend? You could run far and wide with this.

Then Angie notices you’re noticing her, so she apologizes for looking out the window.

“Oh sorry,” she says, “My last customer left here in tears. I was wondering if I could still see her.” Then Angie starts to focus on your split ends.

While she snips away, you now wonder why the previous customer left in tears. Was it because of Angie? You know you can’t just assume, but assuming is all you want to do. You try to find a place to land.

You write some decent plotlines in your mind. Angie caused the tears by giving a bad haircut, or by inadvertently pulling a sad story from her customer, or saying something upsetting.

It turns out, all these stories are duds. Instead, the customer found out while sitting in the chair that she was going to be a grandmother.

I don’t know the person who cuts my hair, but I know my husband and I still make assumptions about him. Further, I can do better than simply handing him a fish.

Paying witness to someone helps me to listen and ask. It helps me to be okay with not knowing how their story will end — or to feel responsible for finding their story’s end. It’s remarkable how the willingness to not know the trajectory of someone’s story, either from where it begins or to where it’s going, allows the story to be told, sometimes for the first time.

To pay witness to such a thing — what a beautiful story that is.

---

Be well, friends.