Try to change your relationship to your fears. Don’t banish them. Don’t fight them. Don’t turn and face them down. Instead, see whether you can learn to honor your fears—which means listening to them, being curious about them, and admiring them as part of the real you. Do this—gently, generously, kindly—and they will show you what you truly love.

On your journey, you’re told to dismiss your fears, to confront your fears, to step outside of your comfort zone. Yet this is all so misleading. Your big choice in life is not “comfort or no comfort.” It is “love or no love.” When you step into things you love, you will feel fear. That’s not just OK, it’s fundamental. So fundamental, in fact, that if you’re doing something and you feel no fear, then you’ve lost your love.

So, take the path of fear, because the path of fear is the path of love.

Knowing how things are doesn’t make you see them correctly, doesn’t stop you from seeing things incorrectly. Stare at the image as much as you like, it’s all in vain. It will never surrender the truth, not to your naked eyes; you have to go in armed with a straightedge.

You said it yourself. I always noticed them. I noticed them because I couldn’t help it. Only from the inside can you know what it’s like from the inside. Understanding isn’t just knowing or learning what it is but knowing what it’s like.

Over time, a person who enjoys a higher vagal tone will begin to see and construct the world differently. I mean this literally, too. As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in her book How Emotions Are Made, “You may think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” People who are scared take in a scene differently. Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech. Anxiety narrows our attention and diminishes our peripheral vision. A feeling of happiness, by contrast, widens our peripheral vision. A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as a wider, more open, and happier place.

In order to see our son differently, Sandra and I had to be differently. Our new paradigm was created as we invested in the growth and development of our own character. Paradigms are inseparable from character. Being is seeing in the human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what we are. We can’t go very far to change our seeing without simultaneously changing our being, and vice versa. Even in my apparently instantaneous paradigm-shifting experience that morning on the subway, my change of vision was a result of—and limited by—my basic character.