Nothing You Could Use

Dear Kate,

Why do you want to know anyone if you don't need to?  You have enough to deal with: yourself.

Who carries your history but you?  Those picking up after you are picking up only pieces necessary to carry their own.  Anything more they would be picking on you and you don't want that.

And meaningful words are the worst, too incisive for anything but surgery.  We don't want to be picked apart when we can hardly keep ourselves together.

So, please, either a 👍, a 💓, a 🤗 or whatever token gesture you can spare to show you aren't against me.  Anything else you can just piss off, and I mean that with both of our mental wellbeing in mind.

Going back to what I first said: why know anyone else?  It's not that you are stingy or unkind: you simply can't handle it and frankly don't need it.

Instead of philosophizing let me paint you a picture that you are painting right now.  You were on vacation last week and now you are back to work.  And once you are working, you are all about work.  That's what it takes for your work to work, and that's how you want to work work.  In fact, if your boss is to suggest you can relax and maybe even reassign you to a lesser role, you would not take that as kindness or assent to your humanity.  Instead you will likely think someone is trying to sabotage your effort to keep yourself together, someone is picking on you, picking you apart.  As long as you are delivering the results, you don't know why you want to read anything but  👍, 💓, or 🤗.

So when you can finally quiet down for a very brief moment to not work, what would you do?  You would, of course, do things to enable yourself to work better tomorrow.  If you want to take in anything, you want it to take your mind off work, not to go deeper into the meaning of it, let alone questioning the fundamental assumptions, the very structures that hold your life together.  Mindless entertainment, for example, is thus not so mindless after all.  It does what we want it to do: 👍, 💓,  🤗 and that's all we can handle when we don't want to handle anything.  What is addiction but an acquired taste?

I am sure you are dying to hear the lesson of this lecture, and characteristically eager to pledge to change.  None of that.  No altar call for you.

I raised a question first and then again, and now finally once more: why do you want to really know anyone else, unless the knowing is somehow useful to you?  You can't afford the time.  You have not the mental space.  You have more duties and worries than three of you can handle.  You can give money to help, if someone needs help.  Maybe make a phone call, volunteer your kindness.  But if the said person is dead and many years ago and the history she carries messier than winter slush, then why would you want to, say, pick up a book and read her story?  Unless you are an activist, I suppose, trying to pick up pieces of her stories to advance your own.

Another person needs to be of some use to you before you'd hold off on your own story and pay attention to his.  As to living into this other person's story, it might sound interesting philosophically, but really, what the hell does that mean?  It's never gonna happen.  You are You and no one else.  What's in it for me? is the question, and once I got what I'm in for, I am outta there.  I might go around telling people what good you have done, for me to have access to pieces of you, but what they will hear about you will only be that: from the perspective of how I have made good use of you.

We are apt to suspect any claim about God, someone who claims to be living in His presence, knowing Him well, reading His big book (snippets of it anyway) more than anything else, especially to the exclusion of everything else.  Anyone with an exclusive interest in their portrayal of another being is also excluding in his seeking of self-interest.  Our instinct tells us whoever speaks about any Ultimate Being is ultimately speaking about his view of our being.  We feel right to resist the language of Man that reduces us to something less.  But how?  Can I trust Me to speak truth about Myself, if I am so hungry for 👍, 💓, and 🤗?  Can I become that tyrant to Me, the God that I so resisted?

There is no conclusion to what I said today, only a picture of the human condition that, by sunset, you would have painted for another day.  I know I have wasted your time.  A cup of hot chocolate would have done you better. ☕

Yours, Alex