Try one day

See the person, not the function

In the course you can listen to this story: 3–4 minutes of voice. Here it is the text. Read it before sleep, without hurrying. It is a story from ordinary life, not a meditation.

The first evening. A painting by Nicholas Roerich, “Mother of the World”. It shows a woman in blue among the stars. A veil covers her eyes. And still you can tell: she sees. Tonight we are recognising in ourselves the ability to see a person as a person, not as a function. The practice of the first day is simple: to see a living person in the cashier or the courier. And to ask about them, not about the task.

I am Boris, and I read these evenings. For fifteen years I was married to Yulia. She is gone. The house went quiet. In the mornings I have to get up and be steady for my two daughters. And inside, everything is shaking. Only in that quiet did I hear how much in our home was said without words. With hands. With things done that I so often failed to notice. While there was still someone to do them.

The stories in these evenings are composite. They are put together from many lives, and the names in them are different. Tonight’s is about an apple. A mother never once said “I love you” to her daughter. Not when she was a child, not at her wedding, not afterwards. To the daughter, her mother was like the light in the hall: it was there, and that was that. She would feed her, pack her things for the journey, remind her to wear a hat. Whenever the daughter went somewhere far away, there was always an apple in her coat pocket. Washed and wiped dry. The daughter never once saw how it got there. She would find it on the train and be cross: an apple again, as if she were still little.

Last autumn she went to stay with her mother. Her mother was old by then and forgot a great deal. At supper she called her daughter by someone else’s name. The daughter spent a long time over the washing-up, looking at the dark window. She thought: that’s it, I am no longer there for her. And then she realised something terrible. She herself had long since stopped seeing her mother. For forty years she had seen the suppers, the clean towels, the apple in her pocket. She had seen what her mother did. But what she was like, what she thought about at the window, what she was afraid of — she did not know. She had never once asked.

In the morning the daughter was doing up her coat. Her mother came over without a word and slipped her hand into her daughter’s pocket. It was the first time the daughter had seen it. Not the apple, but the hand. Thin, with dark spots. The daughter undid her coat and changed her ticket to the evening train. She sat down beside her mother and, for the first time, asked her about herself. What she had been like at twenty. Who she had loved. Her mother was silent for a long time, and then she talked until it was time for the train. On the train the daughter felt an Antonovka apple in her pocket and held it in her palms the whole way. At home she said just one thing to her husband: “She’d forgotten my name. And for forty years I never knew what she was like.”

Everyone has the ability to see a person as a person. We simply look on the run, without meaning any harm. If even a mother can be seen as a function for forty years, then what about the cashier? We see the change, not the person. And yet someone once put an apple in the cashier’s pocket too.

Tomorrow, do this in one conversation. With a cashier, a courier or someone close to you. Give them ten seconds before you start talking. Look at them, not at the task. And ask them about themselves. Notice, too, the thought that flickers before the word. Something like: hurry up. In the evening, write that down as well. A kind word for the night: may those who once packed your things for the journey feel warm tonight. Good night.