Things we don’t know
I thought I felt it. I could swear it was there, that ever-slight vibration in the earth and something in the air. It is what you see when you do not look, but your mind can fill in the void. There is something happening somewhere.
There are subtleties in the words and body language of an old friend. You can miss them if you only think about your own house. Something is smoldering and for some reason, we need something to implode to give our attention to it.
Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash
Why do I walk with my eyes closed when it comes to you? Somewhere if I just open them, I might see you crying. How did I miss so many signals? I have boasted that in the golden era of time, I was raised in the field of empathy.
How do I know you are hurting if I was wrong about so much? I try to feel like I never have before and still, I fall so short. There is a world of hurt out there and we all carry what we have. Escalation and intensity finally pull the disaster into the light. If only we could see it before now, we could nurture the wounds.
No, we will wait until we are all moving at high velocity and then the inevitable happens, a wheel begins to shudder and it tears away from us as we tumble down into disaster and new normal. It will become the pivotal moment of our lives to which we divide the now from the then.
In a moment of personal breakthrough, I think about you my friend. I look at you intently: “are you OK?” You nod and crack a quick smile and irreverent remark. I do not break my eye contact. “No, ARE you OK?” This time silence. I will not say it again as this would only be degrading, but the truth between our eyes makes you look away. “No. No I am not”, you say.
It is in the slowing down that we find our way. Once upon a time we did that. There was one day that we used to allow us to talk, to build, to play and just hang out. It would seem, that in all of our youthful lack of wisdom, we knew what to do, we just didn’t know it.