04 July 2010
Until now
)Published on July 4th, 2010 @ 02:40:08 pm, using 714 words, 128 views
The discussion of proverbs and sayings on the Thursday before last (Book 10 can be all right, after all) got me thinking about the seemingly impossible magic trick that is seeing yourself. The paradox that is being at once the one who is familiar with every last detail, every last flaw, the keeper of every secret and the one who’ll never get to be outside looking in.
Knowledge requires being able to see from at least a few different angles. And that’s a limitation we simply cannot overcome when the subject is ourselves.
‘It’s difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame,’ as the proverb that set the thought in motion goes. If the frame is merely a situation, there’s always the hope that you might extricate yourself from it to gain objectivity. But if the frame is your very self, what then?
Out of body experiences would come in handy to fix that, no doubt. But what constitutes an out of body experience? And how does one go about having one at will?
‘Who would you be if you could be anybody else for one day?’ I’ve come across that cliché of a question many times and it’s always struck me as the same pointless dead end of a proposition. That is… until a particular answer occurred to me. Untils… saviors which come to our rescue just as we find ourselves tangled in a web of clichés. But I digress…
‘I’d choose to be someone who’s been in love with me.’ Eureka in the bathtub! Someone from the outside looking in who actually gets and appreciates the very best you have to offer. Someone who’s taken by you and could readily list some of their reasons for going from impartiality to bias. That just might qualify as an out of body experience and while at it, serve our purpose splendidly.
Our vantage point is so compromised by the wild brush strokes and blinding colors of different emotions that we can’t see ourselves from Adam. We know what we feel. We act on those feelings. We disregard how we look in the process as well as outside opinions.
Not long ago I had a curious experience going through childhood pictures of myself. Certain shots taken during my 4th birthday party somehow made me look at myself as though I weren’t myself. They made it inexplicably easy for me to look at the image of a raven-haired little girl and want to hold her and squeeze her as though she were someone playing next door, entirely new to my acquaintance and not essentially me on a different stretch of timeline. Time will do that, you may tell yourself. The right amount of time will always make it magically possible for us to see someone else in ourselves - to see ourselves as someone else. Another (if considerably less far-fetched) out of body experience of sorts.
Pondering the sometimes swerving, sometimes perfectly straight line from there to here is quite the task. Cramming decades of gradual change into the space between the image of a child and the image of a grown woman. Reconciling the two and everything that took place to make that journey a fact. Quite the task.
Again, not long ago but more recently still… I sat at the computer watching a video of myself covertly shot by a friend (thank you!) and somehow, quite unprecedentedly I managed to endear myself to me. I’d never consciously thought of myself as particularly endearing and I welcomed the chance to experience this 35-year-old going on 5. For the first time, I didn’t avert my eyes in embarrassment. I didn’t shirk or squint. I made no faces. I watched from outside myself.
It made me ponder on the mystery of me.
Of her.
I’m closer to her than anyone else in the world will ever be. I know her most intimate secrets, her thoughts, desires, prejudices… More than that. I share them.
And yet, I’d never been able to see her and actually… objectively… like her.
Until now. There’s my savior again.
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This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Musings, random, thoughts, oneself, seeing, out of body, experiences, angles, savior, until
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