I once noted that when someone takes away a false impression of you, and you can make them recognize their misunderstanding, they may correct their false impression, but it will feel to them like forgiveness. They're forgiving you for their misunderstanding. And you'll be on probation going forward:
After all the explaining, you won't have cleared yourself. You'll have been given a reprieve. They'll frame it like forgiveness. They've forgiven your transgression...this time! So the next time you trigger another wrong conclusion, you’ll be treated as a repeat offender. No more benefit of the doubt for you, mister.
The amnesiac's friends and family perform all due sympathy, and they intellectually understand the situation. But more viscerally—they'd hardly admit it even to themselves—they take umbrage at having been forgotten.
After 40 years and lots of pricey therapy, she still cannot accept that horrid thing she overheard her mother saying when she was a child.
Finally, she sat down with her mom for a coffee, and summoned the nerve to ask about it. Her mother explained that she was, at the time, rehearsing a script for a community theater production. And all that care and woe and burden dissipated instantly. Like magic!
Which seems like the most natural thing in the world. Why wouldn't it? Conditions changed! If there were any wider lesson to be learned, it would be "always learn the whole story." That seems like the grand takeaway. Profound. Satisfying. Sufficient.
She doesn't even begin to consider the easy release empowered by a minute shift of interpretation. The only change was interpretative, and it was comically minute. None of this is noticed.
Lucid dreamers attest that dreams are 100% real-seeming, and only seem hazy and "dream-like" in recollection. And yet, every morning when we awaken, we sever cherished relationships and lose loved ones forever. How do we react? We blithely pad into the bathroom to pee.
All these vignettes show shifts of perspective grandly torquing our interpretation of the world. And they also carry an odd sense of banality. We could coin the phrase "The Banality of Existence", but it would fall flat, because it's already so innately recognized.
And yet we persist in our fraughtness over this tumultuous world of our interpretation, wherein our suffering is very NON-banal, thank you very much.
No comments:
Post a Comment