Strange Secret

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other."

From "A Tale of Two Cities," by Charles Dickens

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Dear Alex,

April 1859 - the year when Dickens published "A Tale of Two Cities" in series for his new weekly journal in London - was embedded in an era entirely foreign yet familiar to our modern lives. His launching lines in the novel speak intensely of irony: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness... the period was so far like the present period."

From horse buggies and oil lamps in Dickens' historical capsule to contemporary creations, the giant gulf of differences in time and technology becomes warped into one stupendous secret, a unified mystery ubiquitously unique to every being. What is this secret storming in us all?

Relentless restlessness. We are raccoons with a permanent face mask, our identity elusively apparent and clearly eloping.

We fidget, fumble and fume to no end at every twitch of thought and temper unknown to us for most of our moments. We tumble with time on chaotic tracks that could rival the convoluted labyrinths of gray matter in skulls and dark matter in space. The explosion of stimuli to arouse attention, good will, poor judgment and anything in the interim competes without chilling for our hearts and wallets.

Solitude for self-reflection is an anomaly in our schedules. As I am writing now for several minutes, my smart phone and email in-box spark with smart updates in global and local news to sustain my smartness lest I appear less than you. In sleep, our eyes dart forth and back in rapid eye movements defined as REM sleep when respiration and pulse accelerate to submerge us in deep rest. How can we relent? What do we need to rest in a climate callously cool to peaceful and peaceable refuge?

Dickens might as well have been as restlessly relentless as ourselves when he pinned on his first page the words of profound paradox. He wrote at a time when his life quaked in divisiveness, poached in riddle and uncertainty. Turn left or back, stop then or nowhere? Where am I? Who is with or against me? I imagine these may be questions subtly scorching our minds, snuffed out intermittently by smoke and shimmer of magical media on face-recognition, nano-regulated screens.

Silence is an endangered experience. You may think I have lost my marbles if I ponder at rest for too long in half of halved minute. Or I might suspect you are not truly you without words to wiggle yourself out of your cavernous self to connect with me on another island afloat on forces rippling to remoteness.

The secrecy, this mystery of you and you in iterative inquiries cannot be real. I should know you. I see you and you and all you all the time on Snapchat, Skype and clouds of clout to connect persuasively, haphazardly, algorithmically with me and all of me in one and multitudes. I know about your likes and thumbs up, selfies and shots in mercurial flicks and flickers to decisively driven destinations.

Come with me, you croak, come to my circle and I shall encircle you with my insight, prophesy and decision to drive you right out of your ignorant shell like a cannon shooting to Pluto which remains to be debated of its origin as planet or not. See me for what I do from what I know.

The more my mouth babbles on, the lesser of a known being I become to myself and others because there is no language to pinpoint me in isolation. And over these decades of discovering tales of two sides and splits of me and another, I have learned to stay out of breath, out of despair to relentlessly roam and revel in the sacred mystery of me and you made in the image of One.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

If a close friend or spouse is to say to us, You don't really know me, would that be an insult to us?  Would it hurt us to know such ignorance might undermine the very definition of our relationship to him/her?  We might take it as an accusation of some sort, perhaps a prelude to an argument that we can't win.  In any case, it sounds bad, to not know someone that we should know best.

But there's worse.

One time a man said when he told his then girlfriend (now wife), Well, after all these nights of long conversation on the phone, I think I've finally known everything that there is to know about you, the woman was very offended.  And rightly so.  Now that's an insult, to be told we've been totally "figured out" and now no further knowing is required.

There is always a distance between people.  We say we want to break down barrier and bridge over, very noble and true, but what finally breaks down is the metaphor of barrier and bridge.  What exactly is the "barrier"?  A barricade, a wall, a veil, another metaphor?  And what access can we rely on to "bridge over" to the other person, constantly and reliably, repeated result guaranteed?

We all want to settle into an easy rhythm, know what to expect.  When we can't find the product we want on the same grocery shelf we take issue with the uncalled for inconsistency and thus inconvenience.  We believe a progressive life is one that is ever fine-tuned to enable, empower us to focus on the really important stuffs, things that we want and want more of, by settling the many inconveniences along our path into a pattern we can control and thus ignore.  We want the rest of the world to run auto-pilot for us to take flight, ask everything and everyone else to get less creative, less predictable, so that our life can be creative and carefree.

What if to be truly creative is to be care-full?  What if to care more fully we must observe and contemplate on not only the distance between ourselves and others, but also even more fundamentally between ourselves and our Self?  Our head doesn't quite know what our heart wants.  What our mouth claims to want for our own good our hands do otherwise, not rarely to the point of Self destruction.

Do we care enough to know our Self more fully?  Or is there also some settled pattern we can rely on to twist our own arms and reduce our own life into an archetype of something properly defined, well received, much less strange than the Person in our mirror?  And if we refuse to meet the stranger in our Self, how do we even start to talk about meeting the stranger in the Other?

Yours, Alex