Last Monday, I started a blog with the intention of talking about the
best things of 2011[1], but ended up waxing nostalgic about one of Earth’s few
female specimens which had gained my attention and respect.
After the assertive, confident woman I'd come to expect act so demure in a new setting, uncertainty was all I had. To this day, it's all I have. This isn’t a story where an omnipresent
point of view reveals the full depths of each person’s character and the
audience comes away with a clean resolution and an appreciation behind the
A-Type personalities they encounter every day. It’s a real story, and like most
real stories, we can only read the tea leaves and divine our own meaning from
it.
People aren’t constants; a person isn’t a static value
impervious to other factors. It’s easy to see people that way:
Because we often only see them in one or two contexts. This
doesn’t indicate that they’re two-faced or duplicitous; it indicates that they
adopt several social roles over the course of their lives.
Rather, they are functions, end
results determined by a series of environmental factors which are themselves
variables descended from that person’s solution.
Then you have to take into account that the sum total of a
person’s actions are simply those they’ve taken, not those they would have
taken. If circumstance or choice always keep someone away from people and
environments which bring out certain qualities in them, then they never take
any actions which make them a good
person, or a compassionate person, or a driven person, or an assertive person,
or an open-minded person.
Then again, life is a journey of constant development. It’s
not just the variables, but the very substance of that equation which is
altered as we learn and experience. Sometimes, life changes cause these
modifications. Sometimes, the slow progress of making oneself a better (or
worse) person initiates these changes.
Then, of course, there are times when we have a divergence
between what we do and what we feel, or even a split in our own feelings. I’ve
had times where I’ve hated the things I was doing, even as I did them, but did
them none the less. Most people can recount times where they’ve gone about
their daily business as if nothing were wrong, even when they carried an
incommunicable pain inside of them.
And that’s the end of 2011. It’s also the end of each year,
in a way, but 2011 was especially hard for some of the people close to me. The
highs and lows both shape us and both stay with us, simultaneously. We are both
grieving and celebrating, carrying positive and negative without either
cancelling out, while we worm forward through time as fractions of ourselves.
I’d like to wrap all of this up with an uplifting message
about 2012 or a message about hope and renewal, but neither one seems quite
right. As someone who doesn’t feel a lot, it’s hard for me to gauge the correct
social response to things. I’m trying to encapsulate all the positive and
negative of one year, but whenever I do, it feels like I’m giving a nod and
checking off real life experiences that people have had, like quoting an
episode of Family Guy right after watching it; it’s not an empathic
understanding of things gone by, but a recitation of facts, and empathy—looking
back over the path we’ve all walked in the past year—is the point of the end of
year retrospective, reminding everyone of the things that have united us.
But as I go over all of this, I can only think that having
empathy--true empathy—for another person is an intersection of the
one-dimensional lines of feelings weaving through massive expanses of space, time,
mood, and personality, like shooting a needle and thread from the moon to hit a
correspondingly improbable sewing assembly headed for Mars.
It’s amazing anyone can do it.
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[1] Pumpkin flavored pop-tarts, DC Reboot/New Phryexia
(tie), getting my offshore job back, my first year of blogging, finishing
NaNoWriMo again, The Prisoner, making friends with an old ex, Richard’s
promotion, Derek’s baby, Arab Spring. Honorable Mention: Those three games of
D&D I ran.
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