In Flight

For a very long time I kept stock of the slights I had endured at the hands of others. Regardless of whether the insults were intentional or not, I would savor them in trembling detail. Sometimes it was as if I selected them one by one, from a well-stocked storeroom of the ways in which I had been aggrieved; other times I reached into sloshing barrels in the basement and grabbed great fistfuls of sour memories.

At some point in the not-too-distant past I began to wonder exactly what I was doing.

People are exceptionally cruel and exceptionally kind, and rarely in equal measure. Much more often, they are neither of these but instead some combination of thoughtless, inscrutable, distracted, pursued by their own wolves, beset by intentions and expectations about which the rest of us are likely to think the very worst and to be mostly wrong.

In a moment of insult, I suppose it is nearly impossible to pause and consider anything but our own deeply personal, highly subjective experience. Our higher reasoning, the way we ferret out some sort of truth and meaning from a tangled set of complexities in an uncertain world, is what makes us human, but how quickly this skill becomes distorted or flies away in a moment of panic.

Sometimes I think my higher reasoning is like a hot air balloon, which I am cautiously maneuvering and whose heat and pressure I am carefully monitoring. It seems like a lovely, floating contraption, perfectly reasonable and safe, until a storm hits or until the burner fails. And then, without warning, I am in free fall.

Do you ever see yourself in the moment of hurt?

I had a fight with someone I love. We were both concerned with protecting our own vulnerability and unconcerned with the fears of the other. We circled, trying to explain — reasonably, we each thought — the very logical and fair positions of our respective-and-yet-not-opposing sides. As we shot flames at each other’s reasoning, two helpless balloons no longer in graceful flight, I saw myself clearly. A wide-eyed and wild animal poised to flee, so far from my own human self that I could not possibly recognize the human need in anyone else.

The memories of the ways in which people have hurt us are how we protect ourselves, a catalog of the problems we encounter not as creatures in the wild but as humans in the world. But too often they become more than that, stories we create after the fact that ascribe the worst behaviors to others so we never have to see those behaviors in ourselves.

You cannot see the hurt in someone else when you see it only in yourself. Perhaps it is not reasoning that makes us human, but the ability to keep safe the wild animals we love.