Becoming perceptive
This is the second part of an essay series that began with “Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process.” It can be read on its own.
Becoming perceptive
Detail from The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan Van Eyck, 1434
I went out to see what I could see . . .
—Annie Dillard, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”
When Abraham Maslow did clinical studies of people who self-actualized, one thing that set them apart from others was, he wrote, that they lived “more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.” They were, to put it simply, more perceptive.
They were perceptive about their emotions—more attuned to what they felt than others, and less prone to intellectualized introspection. They were perceptive of external reality—more receptive to what was going on, and less caught up in fictions about how the world works.