Our Own Private Loves
One of the saddest things in life is how little we share in common in terms of our truest loves. Think about a song that you adore, then think about the five seconds of that song that you have to wait for while your engine idles in the driveway, the five seconds where your emotional state aligns with a singer's voice or a viola chirping, or a quiet pause between notes in a solo. Now think about trying to explain that to the person next to you (if there is one) or during a casual encounter with a friend who may yet be unfamiliar with said piece of music. No matter the intensity of your enthusiasm, you are 99.9 percent likely to fall short of inspiring the object of your obsession attack to feel the same level of appreciation for whatever it is you are appreciating. That is the nature of people and their idiosyncrasy. We are all different, and while we may share interests to varying degrees, our love is only bestowed upon very few things. And those few things are pretty much our own.
I was faced with a situation where I felt that a love of mine was shared by another. It wasn't a song or an object or anything with precise concreteness. Instead it was a method, a philosophy (a term I use cautiously) about approaching being creative with words. Studying creative writing meant coming across a lot of people who were interested in the same thing as me, only not really. While writing, in all its vague and unkempt wonderment did bring a diverse group of people together, there were very few of us that actually thought of the same thing when the word writing was brought up. Writing is a term I actually don't like very much, along with writer. There is a pretentiousness about the whole thing that has always made me feel like I'm trying to impress somebody by saying it. For that reason I tend to avoid talking about it with others in general. Amidst my studies, though, I did come across a person who surprised me.
If you're lucky in you're life you'll come across a moment when you look into somebody else's face and say "Oh hell yes," because one of you will speak a thought and the other will hear it as if it was their own mind talking to them. Beware of involuntary bowel movements or loss of bladder control when this moment arrives. Earthquakes are known to also happen upon realization that there is somebody else on this earth who isn’t completely blank when you say you love Meric Long’s fingerpicking style. It happened to me about approaching a story and I proceeded with the next long while thinking that this was a repeatable event. I also thought it meant something more than it ended up meaning. For all the mind-blowing and gratification that was experienced during this, I came to realize that much of what I thought was a synchronization of thoughts and minds was really a trick of human emotion, specifically my desire to connect with someone on a level other than "Hey".
I've since come to realize that the moment I recreated in my head time and time again never actually existed and that, for all my best efforts, that moment never could exist. It is impossible to see into another's mind. We can look at pictures of it, people can tell us what's in theirs, but we cannot know. That is the definition of “other”. What happens behind my eyes is poorly represented by the words I choose to explain it with. That explanation then goes through the filter of a listener, which informs their words, which get spit out to me and re-interpreted and that's how conversations all take place. At no point are any of those separate thoughts coming from each individual ever the same. In my case, I just wanted it so much that I discarded any information that would lead me to a conclusion that was in opposition to what I wanted. It was a long time later that I discovered this and then came a period in my life (that I have yet to break free of) that my greatest moments of happiness were experienced in total isolation from every other human being on this planet. Nobody else could see what I was seeing, and even if they could see it, it wouldn't guarantee they would give a damn.
After that moment and every moment since I have found it harder and harder to share. When I experience a new song or smell the changing seasons I don’t really look around for someone to talk about it with. I put my hands in my pockets, take another deep breath, adjust my headphones and smile to myself as I lock the door behind me. If I'm feeling chipper, I'll smile.
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