The power that is found in 'how are you?'

​I had a friend reach out recently with a very simple question. The question was this:

How are you my friend? I see all the amazing accomplishments you are making and striving for but wondering, how are you?

There was something powerful about reading those words. I didn't fully understand the power I was feeling in the moment. But later I read the following words and the power made more sense.

L. Ann Jervis says, "to take an empathetic stance towards another means that I am able to transcend myself and my own experience in order to enter into the experience of another. Those who have received such empathy from another will know that there is nothing more healing or more validating than this."

After reading those words, I realized my friend wasn't only transcending HER experiences, she was transcending mine as well. She realized how I was doing couldn't be answered by finish line pictures or a morning article. How I was doing was best found in an answer, not in an assumption.

Over the last several years, I've come to believe there are few - if any - more powerful questions than 'how are you?' And not just 'how are you' - but someone willing to say: I see all the stuff you're doing - hey, that's cool and all - but I want to know how YOU are doing.

You don't fully understand the power in that question until right when you need to be asked "how are you" - a "how are you" arrives.

Or - until at that exact same time - one doesn't arrive.

Some days I think we are all walking around in the clouds of our stuff. Our achievements - our dreams - our jobs and cars and houses. We are walking around in the clouds of our struggles and circumstances. Some days the world feels like one big cloud - your clouds and my clouds - one big cloud....

Maybe that is why it is nice, every once in a while, to see someone emerge from their clouds - arms flailing - forging a path through those blinding clouds. And then they enter YOUR clouds - arms still flailing - until they find you. And they say:

"how are you?"

There is something about that question that is healing, no matter what happens in the answer. I think we live in a world where it is so rare to be seen, that when we ARE seen, there is something healing in that.

There is something magical that happens when someone is willing to fight through their own clouds to get to and through yours. It's the willingness, I think, more than the question that is powerful.

There is something quite brilliant and unforgettable about someone's knowing that WE ARE NOT OUR CLOUDS.

I long for the day when we live in a world free of clouds. The clouds that come over us and the clouds we create for us. The clouds that protect us from us and the clouds that hide us from one another.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it starts with "how are you?"

Try it today. Try it with someone you go to school with or work with or someone who lives next to you. Tell them, listen, I see all you're doing, I see all the outcomes of your life, but I am curious, how IS your life.

I'd really like to know - how are you?