The moments between the moments
I looked up at the sky today at the sun between the trees and wondered if you can ever truly know another person. Perhaps it is the way that we cannot ever fully see the sun. I can watch it rise and fall on the surfaces of the leaves dancing in the wind above me. I feel its warmth and feel it nourish the living world and heat the dark earth still cool from winter. I know of it from the ripples it puts out into the world like wind on the water, but cannot fully grasp all that it is or will be or has been. I supposed people are like that in more ways than we would like to acknowledge or accept. We know them too by proxy in a way.
By the way we feel with them, by what they choose to share or not about who they are and where they have been and what they have seen and how and what they have lived. I supposed we can learn them in a way. What lights them up with pure joy in an unguarded moment. What they look like in the early morning while they are still and sleeping tucked away in the landscape of their dreams.
We can catch glimpses of them in the moments between the moments we have with them.
But to know another person fully is beyond the scope of the nature of our existence here on this plane, in this place. We are all lone travelers here. Some more willing than others to make compromises to align firmly with people they may only know in their own limited way. So I find that many of us – most of us – block out that limitless nature of those we love because we find their unknown corners challenge us in ways that makes it hard for us to create finite certain things with them built of mortar and mortgages.
But if we are honest with ourselves we can only hope to catch glimpses of the others around us, of their truest most closely held selves. That is something that can either provoke in us fear or awe. To really hold another person as an ever-evolving unknowable other that we choose to walk beside is sacred. It holds them above the fray of the world that requires they delineate who they are or will be in human terms.
We can see for a moment how much more we are than all we are. That we are all unknowable. All of us universes onto ourselves. And there is so much beauty there. If we can hold space for another person to be exactly who and what they are most truly then perhaps we can understand — if only in an imperfect way — what it means to walk the world as they do. To witness them and genuinely seek to see as they see.
And yet, most of the interactions we have, most of the people we meet, and many of those we love do not hold that middle space for us and thus cannot imagine someone could want to see them clearly. Most people do not even really like themselves. Many do not know themselves and so they instead reject what they do not understand both in themselves and in others. They cling to the life raft that society has proffered for them. Follow the path. Built the life. Get the job. Buy the house. Marry the appropriate person. Have the kids. Make your way. Let it pass along and know that so too — in time — will you.
It does not have to be a choice, but it often is. Because to build a shelter so strong you can hold the other person’s growth and potential and all the things about them that you do not know as gently as you would a baby bird while also building a material life with them can be hard to reconcile. Often security is put ahead of authenticity and stability held above joy. But there is a dull ache that lives in those compromises that can grow into something beyond our ability to repress or reproach it. I think we all seek to be known. Or perhaps better put I – for better or worse – would rather approach those who I love with curiosity and reverence than to spend my time vying for them to fit into tidy boxes that would never fully suit them.
In ever moment, we are new.
The light that filters down to me from the sun is unique to this moment. And the leaves that dance between us will never appear in this particular constellation again. Even if I come back tomorrow or in exactly a year at the same hour — it will never be the same. So too with those we love. So we must choose. If we can hold their perpetual newness as they evolve — a universe onto itself — or if we will allow them to grow solid and brittle in our minds until they slip away like the dust off old logs long fallen.
It is the moments between the moments held gently that show us for at least an instant how to look into the singular sun that shines out to us in the warmth of another’s eyes and to know that is enough.
