A gripping photo in the local paper brought home the reality of the horrible tragedy of the wildfires that have brought so much devastation to southern California in the last week. It wasn’t a picture of the blazing inferno, or the charred and twisted remains of a home, or a picture of blocks of leveled homes cut down to their foundations as in a war zone. It was a picture of a concerned mother hurriedly carrying her five or six year old child, her face buried in her mother’s shoulder, with three firetrucks lined up in the background. Somehow this simple picture made the agony of this event personal. Why is she carrying her? Where are they going?

It’s easy to get the reality of something like this lost in the numbers — 12,000 homes destroyed, 16 lives lost, billions of dollars in damages, thousands displaced — the mind cannot fathom the extent of this devastation; the mind grows numb with the figures. But reading the face of this mother, seeing the child clinging to her unable to look out at the reality of what she might see, brings the situation so much closer to home. We immediately feel with her.

Where will they go? Where is the rest of their family? How much have they lost? What about their pets? What about school? Did the school burn down too? Can they rebuild? Where will they live in the meantime?

Each one of those thousands of numbers is a story with loved ones, friends and family, and pets, not to mention the hopes and dreams of a lifetime. The devastation is impossible to fathom; the reality of one person, however, is something different. We need to think in terms of individuals not numbers or totals. It’s all about seeing with your heart.

I called to check on my brother, who lives in Pasadena, to find out they had been evacuated from their townhouse. He and his wife had to drive 40 miles until they could find a hotel room that wasn’t booked. In the process, my brother, who was still in his slippers from having left so fast, lost a slipper to the wind, never to be seen again. He told us his slipper literally took flight. Fortunately, that’s all they lost. After three days, they were back safe in their home, their apartment complex having been spared from the flames. For everyone who lost everything there were even more who almost did, and they went through much of the same trauma not knowing.

Numbers make us callous to the truth. With so much media coverage of an event like this it’s easy to disassociate yourself from the human element. But you can’t have empathy for numbers. It’s all about standing in someone’s else’s shoes (or slippers!). Imagine what they are facing. Connect with their feelings. See from the heart.