So long as I am beating and breathing, I will give myself to you, holding nothing in reserve for tomorrow. Someone far wiser and so deeply measured in his years said something in that manner, holding nothing in reserve for the possibility of a tomorrow. And I can identify with that in a way that binds me to others when I am in their company. I am drawn to them. And I want to be with them, and to commune with them.
And in that way, it is so much bigger than me… I won’t last but what will… is that it was never about me. And that’s the case in everyone else’s story other than my own. Their story was never about my story; it was about them and my interaction with them is nothing more than a cameo in their subjective story… now that’s a deeply humbling experience, isn’t it? What a potentially unnerving perspective… to know on that level that everyone has a life just as intricate and complicated, and as full of conflagrations as your own (in scale… big fish in little water).
Sonder.
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. (Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
And in everyone else’s story, it was never about you! You see, we’ve been sold on this idea that we’re number one all the time. And though the statement is true, it is only as true as to say that the head’s side of a coin is indeed a coin. So, to disavow the obligate, unobtainable and unobservable tail’s side is only a half-fulfilled observation because it ignores that you cannot have one without the other. This is to say that though I am number one, the Infinium of sorts, alpha and omega, then that is to say that I am also in full command of every plan I have successfully wrecked… and so is everyone else.
Because I am only I to me, and just as the eye cannot look upon itself, I can only experience the day-to-day of consciousness through my own subjective aperture. As we get older, society and our fear of not measuring up to it often adds more stuff to the ego. More stuff that distracts us from the undifferentiated self, or as the Taoists say the Mind of the Uncarved block, Pu.
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The way you feel about it doesn’t make it any less true but the way you are informed by its truth gives clarity into where those feelings find their shadow archetypes. Moreover, to take them to their logical conclusions; what those feelings deliver upon is where the feelings find their vulnerable and ego-driven roots.
And isn’t it true that humility requires this perspective, moreover the ability to have a perspective beyond speculation? If you would allow me to provide an example, this is the way in which I experience this:
My wife and I went to our favorite beach to share some wine, a snack, and a little bit of cannabis (don’t tell my mom) over a sunset. And as the time came and went and the amber glow began to lessen its piercing hue, the crowd began to clear and as the children and the people whose time demanded them and commanded them to be in places other than where we found ourselves, did we remain in the company of the remaining few.
And as we considered going back up the long staircase to the parking lot up top, I saw this woman stop from her otherwise monotonous and mundane task of putting away her garments – coincidentally what we were also doing – and in that moment it was if a flash had occurred and I was teleported into this woman’s body as I was sucked from my own. And for what felt like an eternity but objectively was no more than a couple of seconds it was like my consciousness uploaded into her brain, unable to control her movements but that everything she did was a mirror image of what I could see.
The spell was broken when she turned her gaze towards me and I saw myself there with my wife. And at that moment we both seemed to linger. She looked at me and I looked at her and for a second… just a second… it was as if we had just done the same thing, but in her regard through my eyes. She smiled warmly at me, though I was at a loss for what had just happened. It wasn’t dissociation. I had a vivd memory of what happened. I remembered everything. It was a type of intimacy that I hadn’t experienced until that day, and I will never forget what that felt like.
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Now that’s some grown-up stuff there… fuckin creepy really.