When the thought first emerged this spring, I mistook it for a dark one. After Sam and I had spent 10 months apart in different countries, he, surrounded by people, me, struggling with loneliness in increasingly strong and diverse ways, I was hurting, and I wanted him to grasp, to really grasp how I was hurting and how much. Yet, one evening, sitting on the couch and staring out into the garden, I concluded, with immediacy and finality that he couldn’t.

Following that initial realisation that he, even he, could not without turning dishonest say more than that he understood that I was hurting, I have spent hours juggling that insight in my mind. I have since realised that not only could he not understand me, I also could not understand him. Every time he said that he wished for some silence, my instinctive reaction was that he was mocking me, his words felt like punches to the stomach. In my false belief that I knew how it was for him to be with people, I negated his feelings and, on top, turned them against him.

A question then forced itself upon me. If we who love each other cannot grasp more than that the other is feeling discomfort, can any person ever really understand another? As I articulated the question, I felt as if a dense, dark cloud expanded in my mind. If no-one can understand one another, aren’t we doomed to remain what we were not built to be, islands, in vicinity of, yet isolated from one another?

I decided to play with the thought. Could I reframe what not understanding meant? What if the insight was not dark and heavy but light? What if the realisation that our capacity to understand was limited was not suffocating but liberating? A ray of sun then pierced through the grey mass. If we cannot understand, we only have to acknowledge and care. That is much simpler and well within our capacity. “I recognise that this is your reality. Is there something I can do to help?”

But not: “I understand.” Although we might want it to be true, it will seldomly be. How could I have communicated my loneliness to Sam? How can a person who only ever traveled to go on holiday understand the physical desire of a migrant to hear her mother tongue spoken on the street, not just the radio? How can a white European understand the experiences of a black European and how can a white collar understand a blue one? Brexit and Trump and still we think we understand and allow ourselves to judge and the rifts between us deepen.

I think we don’t have a clue. About the small, why a remark sets someone off, the big, a soldier’s experience of PTSD, or the political. However, we don’t need a clue. We need to listen and acknowledge, care if we can and, even when difficult, or particularly when difficult, reserve judgment. We need to accept that everyone’s reality, which might not be our reality, is real for her or him.

This might sound defeatist but at least for me, the clouds have cleared. We are islands but we can throw each other horseshoe buoys when the other is drowning as we are standing on firm land, knit him a blanket when he is freezing even as we are sweating and say “I am here!” when being there is all that is possible. Not expecting from Sam that he reads my mind and soul means not setting him up for failure where I accuse him, righteously, but not right, of diminishing or outright denying my reality, achieving nothing. It also means not setting myself up for disappointment and keeping my bandwidth free for what Sam does give me plenty of, namely love, care and coffee. It means accepting the validity of my own emotion without subjecting it to external confirmation and therefore lending legitimacy to anything I might want or need to do to deal with it. It means appreciating that my experience is different, in its way unique, and that I am richer for it.

There is one exception to what I am writing. Every now and then we come across a sentence in a book, or a verse in a poem, that feels as if the author has looked right into our soul. Like the emergence and dance of the aurora borealis or the sudden sighting of a wild moose, it captivates the entire being. It is a sensation so rare but at the same time universal that it would deserve its own word. Knowing that understanding is so evanescent we could, liberated from the duty to portray and the expectation to receive it, truly bask in the unbearable magic when we are, in fact, privy to it.