i’ve heard it too many times to ignore it
Then I drove down to the airport to look at the stars for a little bit. I had to get out of the house after having been inside much of the day. I took the long way there, feeling the texture of the road under the tires and taking note of the little houses on either side, many with just one light on. How amazing to think about the number of lives in this world, especially with how overwhelming my own seems sometimes and how I’m inundated with feelings I don’t understand. In each of the those little one-light houses lives reside, each with their own set of responsibilities, hopes, fears, dreams, relationships. I think about them and I imagine families sitting down to dinner, their chemistry and interpersonal architecture unique to that household, inside jokes, lovers’ quarrels, ambitions deferred, whole life experiences. There may be someone in that house just around the bend who’s lived in Mozambique for a time. Or worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street. Or whose grandfather taught them how to bend wood to make a rocking chair. There’s no telling. I just wonder sometimes if we realize upon meeting new people that there are whole lives in that handshake. They’re standing in front of you and if you could open them up the inside would stretch far, far back into the distance. Every time I think about these things I’m confronted with the same metaphor–we enter each other through small doors.
"The further up and further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside." Lucy looked hard at the garden and saw that it was not really a garden at all but a whole world, with its own rivers and woods and sea and mountains. But they were not strange: she knew them all.
I trod softly by the houses adjacent to the airport and parked before I drove onto the unpaved bit. The night was relatively clear and the moon was nearly full in the west. Orion was high and I could see the Pleiades, the Twins and the Big Dog. The Dipper was just above the horizon in the northeast, and I wished it would have been higher. After a few minutes of tracing constellations I tried to look at the stars as an amorphous group of celestial lights, chaotic, without the familiarity they’ve had for years, and I couldn’t. I wondered if I had lost something as I gained the familiarity. I thought about a class I took in college, a class on modern poetry, and how I was always more satisfied with my poetry before I took the class, before I learned what I did, before I gained that familiarity. I wondered if the stars still effected the same sense of awe within me that they used to, but I’ve known them for so long I couldn’t remember what it felt like not to know. Think about a subject or an area about which you’re passionate and have a substantial amount of knowledge. Do you remember what it was like not to know? Can you trace how your attitude toward the subject has changed (it invariably does)? I have a voracious appetite for knowledge but I want to remember what it was like before I understood, the wonder and the mystery. It’s almost impossible to have both the understanding and the wonder; only the very best of men succeed.
the lovers, the dreamers and me
It’s almost impossible to have both the understanding and the wonder; only the very best of men succeed.
Very well put. This entire entry was, really.
Hope you are well :)
Thank you, Em.
I am well. Asleep, you know (really :)
Inside jokes are the best!
On a more serious note:
I do think some people take the meeting of a new person for granted. Sometimes meeting someone is just that, a “Hello, my name is…” and it doesn’t go much farther than that. But at the hello, you don’t know how deep the relationship will go. Will it turn into a worthwhile friendship? Will you end up mortal enemies? Will you never see the person again? Who knows! But in meeting, both lives are changed and there is potential for knowing the larger inside.
It’s true. Maybe it’s a self-preservation mechanism? I suppose if we went around trying to realize the depth of another person upon the initial meeting we wouldn’t be very bright conversationalists :)
I know some people who could really use that excuse! :-D