What The Dog Saw

"What is the first thing that we want to know when we meet someone who is a doctor at a social occasion? It isn't "What do you do?" We know, sort of, what a doctor does. Instead, we want to know what it feels like to be a doctor, because we are quite sure that it doesn't feel at all like what it means to sit at a computer all day long, or teach school, or sell cars. Such questions are not dumb or obvious. Curiosity about the interior life of other people's day-to-day work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses... "
(excerpt from What The Dog Saw and other adventures by Malcolm Gladwell)

He went on to share that he diliberately went through a spiral dive in an  airplane to understand what Kennedy experiences in a plane crash... to know what may possibly go on inside his head as he went through that.

Creation of an experience in order to understand better what another person may be thinking, that is something that hit a chord in my heart. Probably there is this desire to do that every now and then in each of us, especially when we hear of something and we want to go beyond the knowing.  I know that it is painful to sprain my neck but do I really feel it? maybe not if I have never sprained my neck. Not that I have to construct that in order to know. That will be really silly I guess. What I gather is that no matter what experience someone goes through, we need to take it seriously and not make light of the situation. To be really able to identify with people different from us (we share different experiences in life) is to see them with the eyes of God because God truly knows each of us, deeply and intimately. He knows the number of hair on our head and what we need even before we bring it up to Him. Only He can fully understand and only He can fully identify and only He can fully give the comfort needed.