"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Much of what we manage, evaluate, and track is visible—quantifiable, comparable, available to be assessed. Self-will tends to work in that register. The things that can be measured feel more real, more secure, more worth attending to. What cannot be seen or counted can seem beside the point.

And yet the things that matter most—the quality of a friendship, the presence of love, the sense of being genuinely known—resist that kind of accounting. They are felt rather than measured. The heart, in this sense, may not be sentimental or irrational. It may simply be calibrated for a different kind of seeing—one that becomes available when the evaluating quiets down enough to let what is essential register.