For many of our hosts, the better they feel about their hosting, the better they feel about themselves as a human.

And yet this enduring struggle to re-cognise one another should not be seen as doomed to hopeless failure: this is because our earnest striving for mutuality is not a promised land but a process evolving all the time. The task before us is a daunting one - first creating and then immersing ourselves in a stream of openings for psychotic recognition, all the while appreciating that each of us is a moving target, different each time at the moment of being found.

Neither Lucy nor Pierre planned their way into their transitions, nor did they kick things off with a good dose of self-analysis. Instead, events in their lives and work led them to envision a new range of possible selves, the various images—both good and bad—of whom we might become that we all carry.

Long before we start exploring alternatives, we also begin to disconnect socially and psychologically. A slow and gradual shift in reference groups—relevant points of comparison—starts to take place. June, for example, began to identify with the values, norms, attitudes, and expectations of people working in the business world and began building relationships with people outside academia. The nuns in the “becoming an ex” study likewise began to cultivate relationships with laymen and -women, using these contacts to evaluate how they might adjust to life outside the convent.

By studying some of the most beautiful examples of people whose latent potential popped into view when they came into frame, I became increasingly attuned to seeing and sensing the encodings and fire of those around me.

Then one day, I woke up to realize that my entire emotional state had changed, not just in my work, but across my entire life. Instead of feeling frustrated with what people are not, I’d made a monumental shift to feeling grateful for what they are. I wish I’d made this shift decades earlier but as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.