I recently posed the following question to a group of teens participating in People Change People’s The 6Teens Project: “How would you like adults to respond when you make a poor decision?” One student, whom I’ll call Heather, answered, “We don’t want them to think this one choice is who we are.” For example, if she cut class, she would like her teacher to not view her as Heather: the girl that cuts class.

Heather made a great point. We ought not to define a person by one decision. Such a narrow focus will overlook valuable aspects of Heather’s character, such as how she responds to her poor choice and the corresponding consequences. Our scope of inspection needs to be broader. We would be foolish to attempt to understand a novel by reading only the first sentence of each chapter. (I tried that in middle school. My grade on the quiz corresponded directly to my knowledge, or lack thereof.)

People are like books: between two covers a reader finds conflict, success, failure, and beauty. Our reading literacy, as I mentioned in May’s newsletter, is a gauge of our ability to plumb the depths of a book and comprehend the complexity of plot, character development, argument, and intent. Doing so requires that we develop more than merely our ability to read words. Likewise, the ability to read people—what I call Relational Literacy—requires comparable, if not superior skills. Relational Literacy is the measure of our capacity to truly understand and connect with another person.

Relational Literacy requires two indispensable elements:

1. A desire to learn. We welcome surprising twists and turns in a good book. We ought to do the same with people.

2. Understanding finite events in their larger context. Hold loosely to the actions of another as you would the cryptic lines of a poem. We gain clarity only by reading and rereading the lines with a tenacity to understand.

Developing our Relational Literacy helps us better understand people; their successes, failures, joys, and sorrows. It is true that our choices are in many respects the ink we use to write our life’s story. But we need to patiently let the plot unfold in others. We do well to extend the same patience and empathy to our own life story.

At some point in the near future someone will most likely ask if you know someone else. This is a common occurrence. I just returned from coffee with a friend. Sure enough, we each raised the question more than once. But in what sense do we mean we know, or don’t know another person? In most situations we mean to affirm the existence of a particular human being. It’s a binary question: his or her existence is something of which we are or are not aware.

I would say I know my wife, my children, and my friends. What I mean is that these people are very familiar to me. Their presence in my life is something I’m accustomed to, and for which I am grateful. But there can be a life-sucking, dark underbelly to this kind of familiarity. Through familiarity we come to assume we truly know a person. The unfortunate result is that we only detect what we’ve known of this person. What we fail to recognize, when we place people in an “identity prism,” is how we have numbed our senses to perceiving new, previously unseen fractals of an individual’s identity.

In 8th grade I needed to watch a video I missed while home sick. So I showed up early one morning, before most teachers. I had a janitor open my teacher’s classroom. I wheeled out from the closet his ginormous VHS and TV and got the show rolling. At some point during the video my teacher entered the room. He looked at me in surprise and said, “Oh, hi, Andrew. You got in. You’re all set. Wow, you’re smarter than you look.” Realizing his faux pas, he began to stammer and backpedal. I told him not worry about it. (The upside of this encounter has been my firm pledge to look far smarter than I actually am.)

The industriousness I demonstrated on that morning in 8th grade did not fit my teacher’s perception of me. He thought he had gotten “the essential Andrew.” I catch myself doing this with my own family and friends. I limit what I see in terms of who I think they are. There is a sense in which I need this person to not change. When people change, we have to change. If we can perceive them as static beings we don’t have to work so hard. Life is predictable. We want people to be like McDonald’s. No matter where you go in the world a Big Mac tastes the same. We have an appetite for consistency and predictability. People, when you really get to know them, are neither.

We can’t help knowing people based on how we’ve experienced them in the past. What else could we draw on? What we can help is the capacity for surprise that we cultivate within ourselves. We can learn, I believe, to develop an expectation for awe and wonder. This may sound woo-woo. But I’m talking grist here, the meat and potatoes of relationships. What I know is that if I study the people around me more, and look for things I’ve not before seen, I begin to recognize brilliance–but only if I watch long enough and with interest.

Picture a group of people getting out of a helicopter on a live volcano. Their faces are lit with interest and curiosity. This is new and fresh. This is not your everyday kind of thing. These people let the land teach them. They want it to teach them. This is how we should relate to people. Let them write a continuous, unfolding narrative of their identity. This begins when we push out the walls that limit our perception and work to create a crater-sized capacity for surprise. This comes naturally atop a live volcano. Humans are no less unpredictable, evolving, and intriguing.