August 9, 2009

• Detectives in a World of Mystery

  Everything has an explanation, but we usually don't think about that.  The other day I was sitting at a stoplight when I saw a lady zoom by in her truck and throw her cigarette out the window, so that it landed right in the middle of the intersection.  Just like that she had thrown it, and was gone.  As other cars drove by the cigarette began to roll a little, and I began to think.  Later on a person might walk by and see it lying there, but think nothing of it.  But really it has an explanation for why it is there, which I had just witnessed.  And everything else has an explanation for how it got to be that way, too.

  It is interesting that people form conclusions about others solely based on their limited interaction with them.  For since different parts of us emerge depending on the time and place, every single person we know has a unique conception of us, since they can only base it off what they have seen of us specifically.  And this means everyone we know has a false conception of who we are, since no one has been around us for all of our life. 

  Does this mean that people have false beliefs about us?  Most likely.  I went to a coffee shop the other day and saw a group of foreigners sitting in a specific booth.  'That must be the foreigner booth,' I thought, as I remebered that foreigners had been sitting in that booth the last few times I had been there as well.  Of course, I went on to think, that is absurd.  It just so happened that the booth had been filled with foreigners the specific times I was there.

  Similarly, we might see a nodding acquaintance at a movie rental place a few times, and every time he gets a chick flick.  Thus, we conclude he must be very in touch with his feminine side.  However, what we don't know is that he has a girlfriend and he lost a bet to her, which meant that she got to pick what movie to watch on movie night for the next year.  He must have been very confident he was going to win the bet. 

  Sometimes it is hard to remember who we are in a person's mind, because we forget what we have said around them.  That is why it is always good to just be honest.  We always want to act in accordance with what people know about us, which is difficult if they are barely ever around us, and yet they think they know us pretty well.  Thus, we should always be ready to introduce new facts about ourselves to people, so we can always stay the same person to everyone.  Otherwise we become politicians, and that is no good at all.

  It is weird meeting someone new, because they think you are no one at all.  They will know none of the explanations for any of the things you say.  This is them not thinking about where the cigarette came from.  We don't think about explanations which we don't have access to.

  Thus a person who constantly picks up new people in life, who always moves from group to group, place to place, will not have anyone who knows a lot about their life.  There will be no one to find out all their explanations, to see all the inside jokes they have with themselves, to notice all the things they do not say, to guess what they are thinking as other people talk.  They will be a mystery which no one can know.

  For what if there was a person who had always been with us throughout all of life?  Then they will know all our explanations. 

  There are two ways to find out explanations.  One is by knowing someone's stories, and the other is by waiting for them to say it.  So a person who had always been with me will understand why I limp sometimes.  They would have been with me in high school when I ran and ran and ran in the summer, and it was too much running.  But I kept running, even though I shouldn't have.  And then by winter I couldn't run anymore, and this made me very sad.  A person who was there will know why I limp when I run around too much, and probably what I am thinking when I see someone running by on the sidewalk.

  Or sometimes explanations come in the future.  A person who was with me throughout all of life would see my back cringe wildly at times, and would probably wonder why.  Then last week they would have heard me explain that when people walk behind me, my back cannot help but get wildly suspicious and think it is going to be attacked.  That was the first time I ever said that to anyone, and they finally would have known why the cigarette was there.

  And if we were that person we would find it is very hard to figure a person out.  You will see the allusion they made to that book there, the joke they referenced from that TV show then, the place where they learned that piece of trivia they just knew, all the stories they don't tell quite correctly, what they thought of other people when they talk about them to others, and all the rest.  Eventually it winds up that there are many explanations for how a person is.   

  A person who saw a person throughout their whole life would see how true it is as Shakespeare says that every man in this life plays many parts.  They will see the times that they were humiliated, the times they made everyone laugh with a story, the time they were quiet and said nothing while others talked, the time they decided to be very silly, and so on. 

  And how exciting it is to find out an explanation after so long of not knowing about it!  We may have a friend who at 2 A.M. says they just got home, and perhaps the same thing happens several times a few months apart.  We ask quickly, 'Out this late? Whatever for?!' and they say 'Beauty likes to play hide and seek at this hour' but then we grow confused and the conversation moves on.  Then we visit them, and it is the first of the month, and we drive out to a nearby mountain.  Up the mountain we hike and hike until we reach the top, and we see a million stars stretching from horizon to horizon.  And then we hear them whisper, 'There you are, Beauty.' 

  People stay mysteries because they are very afraid of trusting people.  We implicitly say 'Stay away, I don't trust you!' when we fail to tell people things about us.  We don't hear it, but inside our heads we have little voices that whisper, 'Do not tell them what you really think, just stay hidden.'  We find out we have this voice when we finally tell someone something about us we have never told anyone else. 

  In this way we are the ones who determine how much evidence people have for figuring us out.  However, we cannot just tell someone who we are deliberately, and spoil the plot.  They have to be with us over time, to put all the pieces together, to truly understand what we mean.  And even then, they are a distance from us.  Buried underneath stories, the tone of our thoughts, the feeling music gives us—humans are always quite far from one another.

  The problem is that humans like to come to conclusions.  We don't like mysteries.  We want to figure everything out.  Thus, we form beliefs about who people are based on something like their driving behavior.  'That person didn't use their blinker,' we think, 'they must be an idiot.'  We think we can solve the mystery that fast?!  Yes, we are much in love with coming to conclusions.  It may be that after forty years of living with that person, we would finally understand them, and then we would think that we were the idiot for concluding about them so quickly.

  When we see strangers we want to figure them out immediately.  We look for an identity we can pounce on and use, like what religion they are a part of, or what music they like, or where they are from.  And then we use that to figure them out and solve the mystery all at once.  We are quite the batch of brilliant detectives.

  How sad is it if no one really knows you?  The truth is that only you know the relation between all the events, people, and places in your life, and that only someone who knows your entire life history can really know what you mean.  It is hard to let someone know you, and it is hard to figure another person out.  We wind up treading just on the surface of most people.

  But the problem with that is that you can't really love someone completely unless you know who they are.  Certainly you can love anyone by saying kind things to them, and helping them with tasks, and providing them with physical necessities of life; but there is someone much deeper inside them who needs loving.  There is the fundamental part of them, the person in them who knows all their explanations, that wants someone to love them.  And that person needs someone to joke with them about certain parts of life, someone to cry with about things that really hurt, and someone to talk with about thoughts that really matter. 

  But this person is far in the future whenever you meet someone.  Because it takes time to find all of a person's explanations.  It may take years of research and thought before you can really figure out how to love someone correctly, just the way they need to be loved.  But that is what intimacy is, and so the question is, is it really worth it to go through life buried underneath a pile of stories and explanations to every single person?  Isn't it worth it to know how to love just one other person on this deeper level?  Is there something more worth it in life to have, like freedom?  That seems to be a very interesting question. 

  • 8:43 pm
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