Otherness

i used to think that loving someone meant knowing everything about them. every mole on their back, every childhood memory that left a mark, every corner of their mind, however dark. i longed for these precious pieces of knowledge, to be trusted with them, and to trust someone with the pieces of me in return. i longed for them for the same reason we often long for things: bcoz we lack them in another place.

at the time, my relationships were sustained by the opposite of knowledge, by concealment: stories not told, feelings unexpressed, opinions withheld. and so, in a quiet place in my mind where i knew i wanted intimacy and this wasn't it, i dreamt of knowing every beat of another person. of a place where nothing was held back, not a single thought left unshared.

now i know that intimacy doesn’t work like that. not really. it does require us to share stories, feelings and opinions. but it also asks that we find the courage to accept that there are some parts of another person, and of ourselves, that we will never know entirely. as much as it is about intimately knowing someone, love is about accepting the mystery in each other too. not being threatened by the pieces of a partner or friend that are beyond your reach, and instead seeing that these unknown parts are what allow for mystery and beauty and newness, even after decades of knowing a person. isn't that a gift? 

i wish we'd realised sooner that love is about closeness, but it's also about tolerating the gap between all people. it might have spared us some heartbreak to understand that we can still engage and connect and be close, but respecting otherness is really valuable. when we can accept that we don’t know everything about each other, or ourselves, then we can remain open to experience.

 

We are Finite

 it's easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, gone to Paris, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

it takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. it's not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you're all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. it's easy to regret, and keep regretting, forevermore, until our time runs out.

but it's not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. it's the regret itself. it's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

we can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. those lives are happening, it's true, but you're happening as well, and that's the happening we have to focus on.

of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. we don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. we don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. 

we just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. we're as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

we only need to be one person.

we only need to feel one existence.

we don't have to do everything in order to be everything, bcoz we're already infinite. while we're alive we always contain a future of various possibilities. 

so let's be kind to the people in our own existence. let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are bcoz, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.