It’s usually when I let someone down that I step back and evaluate my situation, a trait I suspect is fairly common in homo sapiens. It inevitably ends in a feeling of undeserved privilege: I have food, shelter, and time enough to think about my situation in the first place.
I’d feel insufferable if I allowed myself to wallow in that fact, though, even more so when in this case whatever mistakes I made we’re basically addressed by an extended family of friends that caught me in a cushioned parachute. Gratitude is not expected, it’s what friends do. But it’s not every day I realize I have dozens of friends.
The context is frankly irrelevant. As much as one wants to believe one is a special snowflake, humans make mistakes. All of us. Cosmos knows I’ve made my share.
It’s a funny little arrangement: we are the sum of our experiences, good and bad. Like old Ben Kenobi, in my experience there’s no such thing as luck. There’s only what happens, and what happens will shape us. No event, however tragic or happy or seemingly trivial disappears into the void, it all becomes part of the pattern we leave behind, the footprint we made in what little slice of time we occupied.
No one said it would be easy. One of the aspects of the human condition I find particularly difficult is that every once in a while, there’s nothing I can do to help. Sometimes you see someone who got a particularly short end of the stick. Cosmos dished misery, and there’s nothing you can do to mitigate it. Except maybe learn, respect, remember, accept or love.
Parenthood, in my case to a little girl, can really do a number on your perspective. It spins you around, shuffles your priorities. It makes you as much stronger as it makes you weaker. It’s as likely to convert your world from shades of gray to splendid colors as it is to show you that all is made of glass and everything can break at any moment. The exhilarating highs Selma makes me feel by squeezing my hand is put in stark contrast by the crushing lows I can feel when I meet less fortunate people and realize they too, were once three-year-olds who squeezed their parents hand. Hopefully they did.
It’s like a Lovecraftian secret you uncover when you realize that all those avatars you pass on the street are beings just like yourself. They have their own stories, loves, losses and fates. Even that crazy cat lady.
But it’s a secret I can’t unlearn. Like Pandora’s box, once you realize everyone around you is a person with hopes and dreams, and that they are subject to the same wanton acts of attrition by the cosmos, you can’t ignore that anymore. You have to try and be nice to them. Even the ones you don’t like. Because in turn, when you fall — and you will — friends might catch you. It’s quite something.
