An Excerpt of Semi-Coherent Ramblings

I just finished reading Wild, a book by Cheryl Strayed about her adventure hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Which is totally something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, really want to now, and hopefully will someday.  Anyway, the book was great. Her writing was so honest and transparent – it was an enjoyable read. The major thing that drove her to the trail was her need to find a way to come to terms with her mom’s death. She recounts a time she had on the trail grieving her mom’s passing and grappling with sadness and regret that she never got to know the person her mother was apart from the person that her mother was to her.  That concept struck me.

It’s the same concept that strikes me a bit every time I fly somewhere. When I’m sitting in the airport watching all the people, and then taxi off and fly away and watch the ground get smaller and smaller and see more and more people and cars and houses and cities -  I’m just floored by the absolute enormity of everyone. And how tiny one person is within the intricate tapestry we weave into one another’s lives. That the entirety of one person is not contained within the part of the world they share with another person. Yet that’s how we see people, or at least I find I often do. My parents are my parents. My sister is my sister. My best friend is my best friend. Of course I’m aware that they have lives apart from me. And sometimes when I’m lucky I get close enough with someone that they share other parts of their lives with me and I get the opportunity to start to understand who they are and where they’ve been. But what I actually understand is only a small fraction of what I think I understand. My view of them, my perceptions, my interactions - they’re all shaped by this limited, cross sectional, time point snapshot that I have of their lives.

People are hugely complex ven diagram. There’s so much contained in the circle we share with them. But our circle only partially overlaps with the circles they share with others. And it only partially overlaps with the circle that is themselves, their center, their inner being - the most vital piece of all. And that’s just within the time that we know them. Add in the dimensions of time and space and life and the chasm grows exponentially wider. It’s beautiful though, isn’t it? With that impossibly wide chasm, how intimate we can become. Building bridges, crossing over, loving each other even when we don’t fully know or understand. Sometimes even because we don’t know or understand.

It drives it home to reflect on it personally. How do I assume others view me? Do I really expect people to see me for me – for who I am, for where I’ve been, for who that has made me? I think sometimes I subconsciously do and I’m realizing that it’s a little ridiculous. Without sharing the details of my life, introducing every person or experience that’s ever impacted me, describing precisely what that impact has been, I expect people to see me for me (but to never presume that they “know me”). Everything that nobody could possibly understand unless they were, in fact, me. Unless they experienced my life, from my perspective, with my emotional and mental tendencies driving their reactions and formation and development in a perfectly mirrored pattern of my own. And logically that makes sense - of course nobody can fully know me (hell, I don’t even)! Yet I presume to know others, knowing only what I’ve seen and what’s been shared in their limited interactions with me. Me, a small supporting role in the great drama of their life.

Wow, I really started rambling there. 

I guess the point is that people are full, complete, intricate beings. And we are part of their story, we influence their story - but their story is an entity that exists entirely apart from us. They are persons apart from their relation to us. It’s a humbling thing to realize, and a beautiful one. It means there’s always so much more to know, always so much more to learn, always so much opportunity to know and love and understand each other better. A reminder to never stop growing in friendship and kinship and love. And to strive here and now, while we still have time, to know the people that we love, and to get to know and appreciate the people they are apart from who they are to us.