I could never quite understand my wife’s reluctance to put away the dishes after washing them. She is, by nature, goal-oriented— quick to move through a task,less concerned with the order that follows. I knew this about her, and still, I didn’t understand.
One day the task fell to me. I stood in front of the kitchen cabinet, faced it squarely, and stared. I stayed there longer than I should have, thinking: yes, I still don’t understand. And then, for no particular reason, a thought flickered.
Wait. I bent my knees and dropped 23 centimeters.
The world was completely different. The cabinet no longer looked the way it had looked a moment before. Reaching to the back for a bowl — something I had always done without thinking — was suddenly not nothing. What had seemed obvious was no longer obvious. What had been visible was no longer visible. In the space of one small adjustment, I was standing in an entirely different world.
We see from our own eye level. We judge from our own eye level. There is no getting around this — it is simply what we are.
My long-held conviction that I was a thoughtful, understanding, attentive husband is coming apart, one layer at a time. It took me twenty-three years to begin to grasp — even in the most superficial way — the twenty-three-centimeter difference between myself and the woman I love, the one I had claimed to know so well, to be the better half of, even a part of myself.
If a mere physical difference of 23 centimeters took that long to register, what does it cost to truly understand another person — someone shaped by different thoughts, different experiences, a different history, a different life entirely? And if 23 centimeters between two people standing in the same kitchen is already that vast — what of the distance between earth and heaven? What would it take to look up and comprehend that height? And what kind of descent was it, then, for heaven to come down to eye level with us?
“Conversion may be the miracle of a moment, but the making of a saint is the task of a lifetime,” as Alan Redpath once wrote. Even after fifty-two years of life, I still find myself meeting, at every turn, the growing pains of that lifelong work. If even learning to recognize a difference of twenty-three centimeters can be called part of that work— then perhaps I am only just beginning.