The Reflection of Those Who See Us

The most valuable lesson I learned about myself was detachment. Not because it was unattainable, but because I searched for it in the wrong place. I sought it in contempt, inhabiting the rigid posture of one who yearns for imperturbability and self control. I sought it in indifference, cultivated as a virtue in a sincere effort to silence the ego. It was in neither of the two, it was in understanding. And understanding, I discovered, is a much more silent and enduring path than all that I conquered with dramatic gestures or the staging of self sufficiency. It is born of profound empathy, of the authentic encounter where we recognize the humanity of the other, knowing that the shadows and lights they project upon us come from their own unconscious abysses.
Because others always see us through something.
No one comes to us with clear eyes. This is not an immutable judgment, it is the reflection of the history of the one who sees us.
There is yet a second layer, more fleeting and treacherous, which is the emotional state of the moment. The same person, on the same day, may find us generous in the morning and threatening in the afternoon, depending on what happened to them between one coffee and another. We have not changed at all. It was they who walked down a different internal corridor and came to us with another light in their eyes or with none at all. The portrait they paint of us in that instant carries much more of their own experiences than of our reality. But they rarely know this. And we, who receive this portrait as if it were an absolute sentence, do not know it either.
That is where the misconception that does us so much harm resides. We treat the opinion of others as if it were a photograph taken with precise equipment, under ideal conditions, by someone with no interest in the outcome.
As if the gaze of the other were neutral. As if it were not a trembling mirror, distorting the image, reflecting only its own projections and not the truth.
The result is that we spend years trying to correct an image that is not ours, striving to undo impressions that, in the end, never belonged to us.
When we expand this mirror to the geography we inhabit, the reflection becomes even more tragic. When we look at each other here, between Israelis and Palestinians, we realize that the same blurred lens that distorts the individual is multiplied by the millions. No one looks at those on the other side of this invisible border with clear eyes. Each side projects onto the face of the neighbor its own historical pains, its accumulated traumas, its profound fears of annihilation and the desperate need to find defined contours where only the fog of conflict exists, and receives in return the exact same distorted refraction.
We fail, on both sides, to see the raw complexity of the lives breathing the same dust. The neighbor becomes a blank canvas where each paints their unresolved narratives and their griefs. We treat the image we create of those living next door and the image they create of us as a sharp photograph of the enemy, when it is, in fact, the same trembling mirror, now stained by generations of blood and distrust.
The collective result is the prolongation of suffering. We spend decades fighting against impressions and absolute sentences born in our own unconscious abysses. And while each side demands that the other fit into the monstrous portrait it has drawn, true silent and empathic understanding remains concealed. It will only flourish on the day it becomes possible to cross that painful internal corridor not to confirm our prejudices, but to recognize the humanity of the one sharing the same land, free from the weight of crossed projections.
True detachment, after all, whether in the silence of a single individual or in the vastness of a divided land, is not about erecting concrete walls or cultivating indifference. It is accepting that the trembling mirror will always exist between us. When we abandon the need to force the other to assume the distorted image we created for them, we rediscover the silent path of understanding. And it is only in this space, clear of the projections of fear and the stagings of the ego, that we can finally see ourselves and the other, sharing the same ground, exactly as we are.
Because, in the end, hope does not rest in the attempt to draw new borders on exhausted maps, but in the recognition of the deep matter that unites us. Israelis and Palestinians are not merely antagonistic figures, they are children of the same arid wind, of the same stone and of the same ancestral root. The land does not distinguish the footsteps of those who walk upon it, it merely sustains everyone with its silent presence. It is in this undeniable belonging, in the certainty that we do not own the geography, but are equally embraced by it, that the true possibility of a future resides. An understanding that does not arise from cold political agreements, but springs from the intimacy of the gaze that discovers that the other is not the negation of our existence, but the inevitable companion in sharing this same and single home.