The hardship of connections, or thus has that ever hit you in any way? Probably being together with family members in such a Christmas party or some other occasion and not feeling really there, or that the conversations lack any kind of meaningful objective. It seems like as we grow older these tendencies tend to solidify, and I wonder if that is because maybe we’ve lost our naive sense of the world, as when we were children and expected the adults to know what is going on.
Then, you grow up, and discover that most people are as clueless as to what is going on in the world, and even in their own lives, and are just trying to get by, on a day-to-day basis, and then it coincides with most of the issues they talk about during meetings. How? Most of the time, as it seems, due to the perils that we have to face while alive, when we have some spare time it seems that we tend to default to easy-to-digest-mentally-topics and the like. In turn, things tend to become sort of shallow. We make small talk about the weather, about the long unseen neighbor that we wonder if she passed away, what we’ve been up to lately, we focus on other people, TV shows, and all the things that make our lives pass by.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I totally get it why we default and stick to these topics and choose them instead of a plethora of other information. They are safe to talk with people you are akin but don’t wanna risk the chance of becoming recognized as a weirdo because of some deep conception you wanna share with others but maybe are afraid they will misinterpret or just won’t get it. But who could we, then, dignify as a worthy candidate for ourselves to share some of our deeper feelings and conceptions about the world and ourselves, if so?
In the end, is it maybe that our inability to connect with others is not really a fault in themselves, but a sort of arrogance on our own part? Considering that others were ‘worthy’ of us sharing our own perceptions, in any case. Or worse even, if we take into consideration that we might be afraid of being misinterpreted, but interesting thing is: what are we making our judgements about, if not based on our own perceptions? In this sense, the other, in a way, seems more like a shadow of our own conceptions rather than a being made of its own volitions. So this, then, begs the question: who really is the Other (for us), if not them in themselves? And also: how does this process, that masks and wraps the others in our preconceived notions, comes to be?
Scary to consider that the other might be anyone else rather than themselves for others too.