I think a principal flaw of humanity is the refusal or failure to grant the other’s expertise. I mean here no stupid human trait mastered to trick level (magic trick, in radical effortless cases). Nor do I mean mere boom erudition magnetized by and alchemized in application and practice to depths incapable of sounding for the comparative layperson.
Both of those are excellent! They spice life up like whoa, and leave us often wondering for more. Both are entirely beside the point, here. Exclude them.
I mean the primal expertise we have. I believe we all have. It is expertise that comes will-ye or nil-ye in a sustained and continuous navigation of self into, within and all through reality. Only a fool would balk at acknowledging yes, this one has had dire plight experience and lived to tell right from wrong, stupid, impossible and unworkable plus plain misguided or mistaken aim - and in all candor, it wouldn’t even occur to most fools. To bother balking at so obvious a duh! Or to decisively withhold such acknowledgement, it wouldn’t occur to them. And in saying this, please know: I myself am a fool. Sorry. Too obvious?
It is never the other’s intelligence one insults with the obvious, but one’s own. Maybe. Most fools (being the only ones who could so balk or refuse) remain inconsiderate of it. Insensate - justly so! They have their own hands, fool! And overflowing in all moment, mostly. Or else all too empty, and such others-assessments ring truly hollow then. A vain procession of bells, tinkling as they take their toll unheeded in a mind occupied by emptiness. I’d disregard that, too.
So I do not assign fault let alone blame, here, but cut us a break. We do what we do because it saved us for this moment. We have much misaligned in us, much unexamined - and very much well-known in experience good, bad, ugly, and rare: brightly, brightly and with beauty! Those last flash to mind when we recall who we see ourselves being. In our best moments, and at our best. Who we are, which is also: what we are capable of.
Which is a mark well-missed and rued in mess-up and deferred untangling, basis-banging and hard work reasoning back up from where we fell - finding why, to aim from thereby. Hard work indeed, and few hark to a clarion note of joy in’t! And so unharked, the note unsounds. Joy never was unless felt and known. Joy never is, unless opened and surfed in a sense innocent and driven curiously to wonder. “Why not always such joy?” BECAUSE, STUPID.
Because: stupid. Yes.
Yes. I am too hard on us. Yet in fairness to myself, and with a mercy I’ve learned to my grief is all too well-deserved (wretch that I am, and do) I am also too hard on us. I mean for us. I have a hard on for us, for persons more than for humanity, that no amount of fad ice bucket challenge could droop, except for occasional tension relief as one’s organ of inexorable jut for humanity must needs exhale.
It exhales blood, but I mean the whole thing spiritually. Not in a gross, physical way. Far be that sh!t from me - and don’t get any on you, either. I assure you it is psychologically impossible to me to mean such things such ways. I find nothing gross in that sense in the physical! Rest assured this lil’ pure boy knows no shame in what’s only natural. Wow. Kill this tangent please, buddy.
Let’s bring it home, buddy. We must be buddies to each other, yet first perhaps: we must buddy ourselves, in a truer and more peaceful buddiness. A peace which finds its purpose within us: a place which exists to buddy from. A root which shoots to trunk and branch in spreading canopy, twigging like mad in budding that blooms not to fruits, so much, but in…bears.
Okay never mind I lost it.
IT’S THIS.
Others views, routines, coping-thriving-and-defense mechanisms and drives, values, tendencies, habits - all their inner array! Its greater splendor blissfully unknown to us (thank God). Which to our cocked eyes, all-askance in the pants and panting for understanding, may yet seem twisted - slipped, far too far-fetched to be fetching, ground to dust and metal shavings in an acrid burnt chemical smell of mismatch and disproportionate exertions, slipped and caught locked gears, perverted, stupid, dense or too-fancy-flighty, or in any other way disarrayed - are not so.
They are fit.
In the sense of “best fit.” With the understood tacky tack-on “…available.” With the further sad cynical note of “or any way, available to examination and trial, largely unexamined, largely untried. ‘Unavailable’ in that sense.” Yet don’t we know? Others are all too painfully aware of the misfit and misalignment that clangs within them, as it echoes out to ripple and widening flood in consequence of their choices and acts. In consequence, mostly, of unexpected outcomes. Unpredicted (well, unpredictable surely!) response.
We know. We know too well the dissonance within, and where and how it meets and fails often to mesh with the dissonance without. We know where and how we don’t fit better than how we do. Either way “why” remains elusive.
Herein though lies our expertise.
It should not be dismissed at all, let alone lightly. Yet we do. And so often, without passing thought so much as only passing through.
The symptom observed is this: the other, apparently, doesn’t know any better. The tart remark scribbled in our interview pad is: how the hell can they not? We know better than that. Please note the glint of humility peeping out! We really cannot credit or fathom that another’s ability is less than ours to grasp what we’ve found-and-valued obvious. We almost entirely neglect to note: obvious is a valuation that a) depends entirely from the found thing’s fit and pop once nested in one’s complex of inner frames, metrics and ironmost assumptions! Obvious pops a certain way within the known. But b) also depends on actually noticing the thing. Whereas invisibility to notice is practically the main superpower of the obvious! I digress. Again.
Shift the interview. Self-examination room. The symptom observed is this: of all the potential ‘better’ coursing and circulating abundantly to be known upon this specific problem we note we have, this too-frequent clash of gears-and-lenses within, HOW DO I KNOW which IS the better piece to install? And which will fit with what I’ve got? And not force too much inner wrenching discard and revision? OH DUH-FVCKADOODLE DODGE!
This specific misfit mangle-clash is not after all that bad. Perhaps it does not need fix? Perhaps it ain’t broke, so much as baroque. Just part of my unique and dare-I-say jaunty setup! Others have worse, and don’t even know or seem to deal with it. So complacency okay?
Yes, complacency okay overall - but on how many individual points, now? And the dissonance of misalignment between our points-complaced and theirs grows, nobody knows how much or how far. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Everybody knows how much and how far. “Why” remains elusive.
Yet upon the spike of the moment, we’ve declared a point insoluble and moved on. We must, to be okay with our imperfectible selves. Another gold star on the benevolence-charged kindergarten report card of our own known well expertise.
The flaw is this. Couldn’t we risk seeing others in the same way? THEIR report cards look like sh!t in our mind half the time! We grade not on the curve of a bell, but on some absolute per-point pivot system where faults must be ganged by redeeming qualities in quantity to offset - or the other falls in rankest rank! Yet really if we step back detach a bit, surely the work they do is not too dissimilar to our own. A difference in substance rather more than kind, and to scorn to see it is…rather less than kind.
By my lights anyhow. Important disclaimer: I only think this. It may be no more or less real than thoughts others have, for all I know. Sorry about the digression, up there by the way! It was no dick joke, merely a metaphor perhaps too equally fulsome and sincere. I need to learn the lesson myself:
Work not too-assiduously the first metaphor that comes to hand. Chances are, that bird should have remained unmolested in the bush, where its worth could be charitably graded “unknown.” Not bushwacked and carried high back to civilization in triumph! “Please! It’s a bird! It’s worth so much in my hand!”
With this post I award myself the coveted Master of Subjectivity degree. Note 1: self-coveted. Note 2: “award” is slightly off. More “I both accord and afford myself” - unanimous decision with one abstemious, begrudged assent to no opposed. 2: it is one degree only. There are at least three-fifty-nine others, and may be as many as 7.8 billion odd. Go get your own. Mine is taken, and indeed too far.
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