The greatest tragedy is not that magnificence is rare but we often fail to notice it until it is gone.
I want to tell you about an average Tuesday when I took my tri-weekly adventure to Whole Foods. I was dancing at the meat counter to the Madonna they were blasting and telling Ariel the meat guy how lovely his eyes were and how much I appreciated all the healthy food he was giving me after my 14 day water only fast I had just finished. A woman standing about 5 feet from me overheard me and said, “I’m a doctor and if I got cancer that’s what I’d do.” I thought to myself (“The fuck you say? You do realize you’re a unicorn”) and then instead I said, “So you know about Valter Longo’s research on fasting and cancer?” “Yes,” she said. So I asked, “Do you know about his latest research that shows that extended water fasting actually reboots and regrows new stem cells throughout the entire body?” She said, “No! Wow, I’ll have to look that up.” Then before we parted, I said, “I want to say something to you before you go …. Have a beautiful life!” To which she said, “Wait a minute… Did you drive up next to me yesterday in a big white truck, make me roll my car window down and then tell me to have a beautiful life?” I said “Yes, that was me!” She said, “Well, I need to thank you because I was having a really shitty day and your doing that turned my whole day around. I want you to know I wish you the same.” And then we parted.
Most of us do not know the impact of our encounters. The person whose day we turned around by noticing them — we drive away and we do not know. The person who feels seen, for a moment, in the ordinary commercial interaction that was supposed to be purely transactional — we move on and they move on and neither of us knows what happened in the other. This invisibility of our own effects is one of the arguments for generous attention rather than against it. We cannot know. Which means we cannot accurately calculate that the noticing doesn’t matter. Which means the noticing always might.
Sleepwalking Through the Miraculous
Most people are not fully present for most of their lives. This is not a criticism. It is a description of what the conditions of modern life produce in almost everyone who inhabits them — the distraction, the rush, the specific quality of preoccupied movement through days that are genuinely full of things demanding attention, producing in most people a mode of engagement that is sufficient for navigation but insufficient for genuine encounter. We move through grocery stores and office hallways and dinner tables and rush-hour traffic in a kind of managed trance — present enough to perform the necessary functions, absent enough that the actual texture of the world and the people in it does not fully register.
The assumption underlying this trance is usually not examined. It is the assumption that there will be more time. That the conversation can be had later. That the appreciation can be expressed at a better moment. That the person across the table, who has been there for years and will presumably continue to be there, does not require the specific, present-tense quality of genuine attention right now. This assumption feels reasonable because it is, in individual instances, often correct. There is usually another meal. There is usually another day. The person usually remains.
Until they don’t. Until the moment when the next time does not come — the phone call that goes to voicemail for the last time, the relationship that ends without the conversation that was being saved for when conditions were better, the person who was noticed only in the past tense, only after the fact, only when the absence made the presence visible in ways the presence alone never had. This is one of the quieter forms of grief available — the grief of the person who realizes, too late, that the miraculous was ordinary and available all along, and that they were moving through it too quickly to receive it.
The Great Forgetting
We reduce human beings to their relationship to us. This is not cruelty. It is the inevitable result of the way human cognition manages a world that contains more information than it can fully process — by categorizing, by simplifying, by collapsing the infinite complexity of each person encountered into the small, manageable role they occupy in one’s own narrative. The cashier. The husband. The neighbor. The colleague. The stranger. These categories are useful. They allow us to navigate the social world with reasonable efficiency. What they cost us is the specific recognition that each person placed inside them is living a life that is vastly larger than the role they have been assigned.
The cashier scanning your groceries has a history. Has people she loves and people she has lost. Has fears about things you would not guess from the quality of her efficiency and her practiced pleasantness. Has, if you happened to know it, a courage or a devotion or a grief or a resilience that would make your estimation of her considerably larger than the category “cashier” can contain. Every person encountered in the ordinary run of ordinary life is carrying this kind of interior — this full and specific and irreplaceable human experience — and most of the time the person they are encountering is not looking for it. Is not expecting to find it. Is not available, in the moment of the encounter, to receive what would be offered if they were.
What we miss, in the great forgetting, is not incidental. It is the actual substance of the world — the specific magnificence of specific people, present in specific moments, that is the closest thing available to the meaning we are perpetually looking for in larger and more dramatic places. The meaning is here. It is in the person you pass every day without looking at. It is in the encounter you could have but do not initiate. It is in the attention you could offer but have been saving for a more appropriate moment that keeps not arriving.
Why We Do It: Fear
The answer, when examined honestly, is almost always fear. Not one fear, not the obvious dramatic fear of visible danger, but the subtler and more pervasive fears that organize human social behavior at a level below conscious awareness. The fear of vulnerability — of caring about someone enough that losing them could hurt, which requires first caring about them, which requires first seeing them. The fear of being affected — of allowing the encounter to matter, of receiving another person’s reality fully enough that it changes something in you. The fear of intimacy — of the specific exposure that comes from genuine encounter, from allowing someone to see that their existence has registered on you in ways that go beyond the transactional.
Seeing people fully requires courage. This sounds like an exaggeration and it is not. If I truly see you — if I allow your specific reality, your beauty and your struggle and your irreplaceable particularity, to fully land in me — then several things follow that cannot be controlled. I may care about what happens to you. I may be moved by you in ways that change my day or my month or, in rare cases, my life. I may be hurt by your loss if loss comes. I may be changed by the encounter in ways I did not authorize. The management strategy that fear recommends, in response to all of these possibilities, is distance. Managed distance. The relationship to other people that is warm enough to be socially functional and careful enough to prevent the specific vulnerability of genuine contact.
Distance protects. It is not without its utility. But it also impoverishes — and the impoverishment is specific, measurable, and accumulating. Every encounter conducted from behind the managed distance of fear is an encounter from which something is withheld. Not only from the other person, though they are certainly deprived of something. From the person doing the withholding. Who is, in the moment of the managed encounter, robbing themselves of the specific form of aliveness that genuine contact produces.
The Cost of Fear: What We Rob Ourselves Of
This is the section the chapter has been building toward, and it deserves to be said plainly. Fear does not only protect us. Fear robs us. Fear robs us — daily, incrementally, one managed encounter at a time — of joy, wonder, beauty, intimacy, connection, meaning, and the specific form of ecstasy that is only available to people who are genuinely present for their own lives.
The stranger never spoken to. The compliment thought but not offered. The admiration felt for another person’s work or courage or beauty and never expressed, because expressing it would require a moment of genuine contact that the fear of being seen as strange, or intrusive, or too much, has pre-emptively foreclosed. The gratitude never communicated to the person whose consistent presence has been one of the sustaining conditions of a life — because expressing it would require acknowledging the depth of what the person means, which would require a moment of vulnerability that the managed distance has made difficult to access.
These are not small losses. They are, accumulated across the months and years of a life conducted from a distance, a life that is considerably less than what was available. The joy that genuine wonder produces is real and it is not available to the person who has decided, in advance, that the world does not contain anything worth being genuinely surprised by. The specific pleasure of being moved by another person’s courage or beauty or kindness is real and it is not available to the person who has arranged, through sufficient management, never to allow another person’s reality to fully land. The meaning that comes from genuine encounter — from the conversation that was not transactional, from the moment of genuine recognition between two people who were both fully present for it — is real and it is not transferable to the person who conducted the same conversation from behind the glass of habitual distance.
People are robbing themselves of joy and ecstasy each day, one encounter at a time. This is not melodrama. It is a description of what the specific cost of fear looks like when calculated not in dramatic losses but in the small, daily, entirely voluntary privations that add up to a life lived at a significant distance from its own most available richness.
The Magnificence Hidden in Plain Sight
Magnificence is not rare. This may be the most important single sentence in the chapter and it deserves to be received without the reflexive skepticism that claims to be sophistication but is frequently just the residue of fear. The conviction that magnificence is rare — that it belongs to famous people and historical figures and the extraordinary in the elevated sense — is itself one of the more consequential failures of perception available. It misdirects attention toward the visible and dramatic while the actual substance of human greatness goes unnoticed in the grocery store, the workplace, the family dinner, the ordinary Tuesday.
Kindness, sustained across decades in a person whose daily choices consistently prioritize other people’s wellbeing over their own convenience, is magnificent. Patience — genuine, freely given, not the performance of patience but the actual thing, available even when it is inconvenient — is magnificent. Loyalty in its best expression, the loyalty of the person who shows up in the dark seasons as readily as in the bright ones, is magnificent. Devotion is magnificent. Integrity is magnificent. The courage of the person who tells the truth when lying would be easier, who keeps the commitment when breaking it would be cost-free, who remains present when presence is difficult — these are forms of magnificence that the culture does not celebrate with the attention they deserve, partly because they do not photograph as well as fame and partly because they require sustained close attention to perceive.
The magnificent man this book has been describing throughout its length is not magnificent because he is famous or powerful or dramatic. He is magnificent because of the specific quality of his character — because of the courage and the devotion and the service and the willingness to be fully present that constitute greatness in its lived rather than its performed form. And that quality of greatness is present in people all around us, in the specific and ordinary forms that genuine human virtue almost always takes, and most of us are moving too quickly or looking in too many wrong directions to see it.
The Tragedy of Familiarity
The people closest to us are often the people we have most thoroughly stopped seeing. Not because they have diminished. Not because what was remarkable about them has disappeared. Because they have become familiar, which is a form of blindness that arrives so gradually and through such reasonable stages that most people do not notice it happening until the person in question is gone and the absence makes the presence visible in ways the presence alone never managed.
How many magnificent people are sitting across the dinner table from someone who no longer fully sees them? How many husbands whose quiet devotion has been recategorized as unremarkable reliability? How many wives whose sustained competence and care has been absorbed so completely into the background architecture of a shared life that it has stopped registering as the daily gift it actually is? How many parents whose extraordinary love has been taken so thoroughly for granted that it will not be fully recognized until the specific kind of attention that grief enforces finally arrives?
The tragedy of familiarity is not that people stop loving each other. Most of them don’t. It is that the love stops being accompanied by the seeing — the specific, present-tense noticing of what is remarkable about this person, today, in the ordinary light of an ordinary day. The seeing that says: I know you are here all the time, and I want you to know that I notice. That I am not taking for granted the fact of your presence. That what you bring to this life is not invisible to me, even though I sometimes act as though it is.
The Decision to Wake Up
The chapter is not ultimately about noticing people, though noticing people is one of its practical implications. It is about the decision — available in any moment, requiring no special preparation and no dramatic conversion — to stop moving through the world at the distance that fear recommends and start engaging it at the level that aliveness requires.
Waking up, in this sense, is not the achievement of a permanent state. It is a practice. A repeated choice, available in ordinary moments, to look more fully at the person in front of you. To allow the encounter to matter. To offer the attention that transforms a transaction into a genuine moment of human contact. To say the thing you were thinking of saying and usually don’t, because it requires the small courage of allowing another person to see that they registered on you. To be genuinely present for the conversation, the meal, the moment — not as a therapeutic discipline but as a form of participation in the actual richness of an actual life.
The opposite of sleepwalking is not vigilance. It is not the anxious, effortful monitoring of the self and the world that produces its own form of distance. It is joyful attention — the quality of engaged, open, genuinely interested presence that makes encounters matter and people feel seen and the world register as the extraordinary place it actually is. It is the quality of attention that I had in the Whole Foods that Tuesday, which was not exceptional preparation but simply the decision to be fully there — to let Ariel’s eyes be genuinely lovely rather than just abstractly fine, to let the doctor’s intelligence be genuinely interesting rather than just generically noted, to let the moment be what it was rather than what a distracted run through a grocery store usually is.
Look Again
Tomorrow you will encounter people. In most cases you will encounter them at the managed distance that habit and fear and the pressure of your own schedule have established as the default. You will process them at the level of function — they will serve their narrative role in your day, you will serve yours in theirs, and both of you will move on without the specific thing that genuine encounter could have produced.
Or you might look again. At the person behind the counter. At the face across the dinner table. At the stranger whose trajectory is briefly parallel to yours. At the people you love, who are remarkable in ways that familiarity has made difficult to see. At yourself — at the specific and irreplaceable person you are, carrying the gifts and the wounds and the quiet magnificence that the world may not always have done a thorough job of recognizing.
The world contains more magnificence than most people’s habitual modes of perception allow them to see. This is not a romantic exaggeration. It is a clinical observation about what becomes visible when the distance reduces — when the managed trance of fear and preoccupation gives way, even briefly, to the quality of genuine presence that makes other people legible in their full complexity rather than in the simplified form that sufficient distance produces.
The magnificence was never absent. It was never rare. It was here all along, in the grocery store and the dinner table and the rush-hour car window, in the ordinary faces of ordinary people who are anything but ordinary when they are actually looked at. Hidden in plain sight. Waiting to be seen.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Whatever we deny or embrace
For worse or for better
We belong, we belong, we belong together (we belong)
We belong to the light
We belong to the thunder (we belong)
We belong to the sound of the words
We’ve both fallen under
This article is an excerpt from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book exploring the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, devotion, and hot and holy love.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and leading expert in counseling, psychotherapy, communication, and human connection. Her first published study, released in 1993, explored the impact of family dysfunction on intimacy and communication in adult relationships. For more than three decades, she has developed innovative therapeutic models to help individuals and couples create deeper connection, emotional resilience, and high-caliber relationships.
