I get this feeling sometimes, when I'm walking past a house. I'm imagining, mentalizing, living in that house, thinking how you would look at the world if it was centered around this place, this home. Do other people do this? I've had to work deliberately, self-consciously to understand empathy, and I'm always trying to practice, to find new ways to think, to place myself in another's shoes.
It's paralyzing sometimes. It's utterly exhausting to be around people, especially more than one person at a time, and being mindful of all their minds, as much as I'm able to imagine them. And there's this feeling, sometimes, when I walk past a house and think about the lives it contains.
A feeling like there's too much. All those lives. Too much to ever be able to tie them all together. It's a conceited idea, maybe, but I don't think it has to do with my ego or anything. I just feel like there's all these lives, all these people, and how do you ever choose which ones to be with, to look closer at? You could spend lifetimes upon lifetimes watching just the people in your neighborhood and not figure out with whom you might have the best chance of a mutually fulfilling relationship.
I sound like a space alien now, don't I? Like someone without any understanding of how human relationships develop or even what they're for. It's true, I have not had a lot of practice in this field in the last 25 years or so. Though I think maybe no one could really answer these questions and I'm just the only one who's in a position to ask them.
But anyway. I just wanted to share this feeling with you. This desperate feeling of seeing a thousand thousand choices before you, great big irrevocable life-changing choices, and feeling like you have absolutely no basis, no context, no information with which to make your choice, and feeling like whatever you choose you're going to make 999,999 people feel left out.
I want to know if anyone, anywhere knows that feeling. And if you do I want to know you, dear reader.
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