Heartworn Highways
Some people just don’t have a good poker face... and show their emotions. And they simply cannot or choose not to hide them. Those who would seek to subdue those expressions are denying that which is within themselves for fear of the outward example of another. Down deep they see that emotion within themself and by confusing the act with the emotion they deny in themselves what they abhore in others. Because I wouldn’t do that… and in that way they tell themselves I don’t feel that. And in that way, they do have a good poker face if they can hide their hand well enough. Hide what? They are at war with themselves: who they are and who they tell themselves they aren’t.
But when you show all your cards, don’t you spoil the whole game? Only if the game was oriented around winners and losers, goals and ambitions, and the promise of a better day by virtue of arriving there first. But if the game was oriented around being completely human by showing all of your humanity, what might that look like? Like everything else… music:
While chunks the size of Delaware
Our heads are buried in the sand
Like junkies hooked on fossil fuel
How long until there's nothing left at all?
Don't you love what you got used to?
To be sincere is to show one’s holes. Theirs and the environment around them. To do it without being held hostage by nostalgia of the past or the optics of a reality in conflict with its actual reality. Those people - young and old - reorient the rest of us to the reality of life. We tend to focus on what we have deemed “negative” such as demonstrations of grief and sadness while priding their opposites of resilience and joy. But the good doesn’t stand in contrast to the bad, rather they are partners that express themselves spontaneously in reaction to life events. The scalable and individual part is the articulation by the individual. But the emotion is in all of us. The heart-cognition. And our denial of that invalidates their emotions and drives people into their own heads.
And like a tank of compressed gas with no relief valve, when exposed to fire it will explode. And to the degree that it reaches your soul, that it reorients you from the sleepwalking so many of us do through life. Our reactions determine how we move forward from that information. Why would we be defensive to that? What is it that their examples stand in contradiction to? What is it that we are so willing to defend?
There ain't nothin more criminal than kindness
There ain't nothin more valuable than blindness
Is it good to forget? Is it good to let go? Yes. But of what? Let go of our emotions or our reactions to those emotions? Our emotions or someone else’s? To let go of our reactivity or to emotion as a prerequisite to humanity? There is no purely logical human. It is in the nature of being human to act in illogical ways. That is after all the nature of the world around us. Not the one we construct; the REAL WORLD. Irreconcilable rascality. It’s wiggly in that way, isn’t it? Who told us the room around us had to be in straight lines at 90 degrees squared? Menards. And they don’t know how to measure anyway. Have you checked their lumber for accuracy?
Perhaps we should let go of our mind’s tendency to want to make everything fit into predictable patterns. This is the illogical exposure of the logic-driven man. When something doesn’t fit the plan, he melts. In that way, he takes the form of the formless and unpredictable, becoming that which drives his mad quest for perfection and assurance. He’s got the wiggles.
Eliminating unpredictability, be that in nature or in people is authoritarian at its core and an attempt as futile as it is destructive. The West has been in a war for control of the natural world for thousands of years. It is efficiency seen in machines and bureaucracy and its acquiescence to the extreme comes at the cost of what it means to be human: spontaneity. When was the last time you were caught off guard? How did you receive that? How long have you been on guard? What are you on guard for? What are you looking for? What do you want?
A parting story from an author I admire. The context to consider is an older man speaking to another man older yet. In our own lives, just as in this story, if we let go of our rapacious urge to figure others out (more specifically the things we do not like), we can instead perhaps see where they are in their life and in that reflection see where we are in ours. And if that is understood by both parties then and there, time can stop for a moment, and we can even trade places with one another for a moment. Just a glimpse.
There were many stories that came out of that meeting. We were out in his backyard, and I was admiring the obvious merits of a life’s work in the gardens and the ponds, and I admired it aloud. After a minute of quiet - he was probably weighing the merits of telling me something I was unlikely to understand for another thirty years, at least - he summed up the whole thing. He said:
“Yep. I’ve been lucky. Very lucky. When we broke up, my wife didn’t turn the kids against me. I got just about everything I ever asked for in this life, and I don’t know how many that describes. But I never asked for love, not really. I went along with it, but I never asked for it. And I never got it.”
That’s an old man’s story.
-Stephen Jenkinson: Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble