Seek dissonance.
Life is a Bayesian exercise. We develop a view of how the world works, experience it working and either convince ourselves we know better about the world than anyone else or be confronted with the sobering reality of our naivety. One thing I convinced myself of is that in your twenties, non-platonic relationships are a threat to becoming. Either you become domesticated by comfort too early or lose someone the same way you found them. All at the cost of developing yourself.
I recently however, found myself at odds with this view. Completely inadvertently.
We tend to interact with the world at a safe enough distance to preserve our souls. Friends and family while at arms length, have already resolved neatly into our existing world. Strangers may press our edges for a moment, but they ask nothing of us in the end. We annotate our interiorities with non committals that we promise to act on, and eventually don’t.
A few days ago, while I observed the artery toward the exit of Martin Place station clog with morning commuters, my Uber driver laid on the horn at a car in front of us. He jabbed it again with a tired sigh, then tailgated close enough that I could see an L-plate hanging for dear life on the rear glass, before whipping round’ to pass. The driver was a young girl, likely in her late teens and unaccustomed to city rush hour. As we merged back into traffic, I looked over my shoulder to see the girl’s hand raised toward me. Whether in apology or something else, it wasn’t obvious. My subconscious assumed the former.
In any case, I was back scrolling through WhatsApp a few moments later.
It was easy to convince myself in that moment, idling in the backseat, that I’d be different. That I would’ve practiced a little patience and decency one assumes as a requisite to being human. Nope. Instead, I had already forgotten the entire thing when I arrived back at my desk.
But sometimes a stranger’s modus operandi begs you to close that distance yourself. Not because it’s familiar, but for the exact opposite reason.
It unbalances you. It creates dissonance.
In music, we find dissonance in notes that clash in tonality. Like when you press down two black keys next to one another. We tend to forget that when this happens, you actually hear each note more sharply than before.
The corollary is that from the dissonance, emerged for me a few sharpened revelations that would’ve otherwise been hidden, if I wasn’t introduced to her.
Our attractions may actually be projections of deficiency.
Most gyms in the world have mirrors lined on every wall. Not because its cost efficient, improves lighting or supports technique (they have pocket draining PT’s for that) but because for a moment, you meet the person you could become. The invitation is too difficult to ignore.
Relationships are no different. They lay bare the deficiencies and insecurities you’ve been papering over. You become infatuated with your partner because there, in front of you, is someone who possesses all the things you wish you were willing to give to yourself.
I live in a constant state of thought. While I get monetised for it at work, it’s robbing me of a whole lot more outside of it. I'm either hyper analysing every pixel of my surroundings at 1040p or ruminating over my own inadequacies and the productive things I should be doing in that moment.
Sam’s doctor said to him, “The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought. — Gabrielle Zevin.
The irony is that while I'm off frying my brain, she’s gushing over a granny smith she crunched through the night before. She has an uncanny ability to always, without fail, find the magic in the ordinary.
The undercurrent of temper is care.
My glaring Achilles heal, is the impatience my temper very much masquerades as.
I rarely have explosive outbursts, but instead what I have is a quieter, slow boiling temper. Which lingers until it’s released.
There are two explanations for why this may be, one of which is not mine. It goes:
What would you put people through to make them patient? We probably wouldn’t give them things immediately.
My take builds on this and is something I alluded to in the beginning of this passage, that is: living extrinsically leaves you at mercy to a world that made no promises to meet your expectations in the first place.
I’ve brute forced my way through life leaning on status, money and acts of altruism with the expectation that those things will pay dividends to my interiority at some point. Heal me of my insecurities. The fact of the matter is that it hasn’t, and it makes me that much more sensitive to each delay.
I can also lose my temper on her behalf and it’s either because I sense a threat to her dignity or what I think matters to her. While it often comes at my own, she doesn’t mind. She gives me the license to just be and exist in a porous state.
She knows that the undercurrent of my temper is care.
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Her factory setting is to smile. She always finds a reason to, even when there ostensibly isn’t. (I think thats the point. If you have no reason to be sombre, then by that very logic you shouldn’t need a reason to smile)
In any case, I learned this characteristic of hers was not by choice.
“Buried behind that smile is someone who carries the weight of her mother’s illness.” — June 14th.
They say you can come to know someone by seeing what survives in their children. Here, what survived was a smile carved by a story once told by an orphan in west India and later, a mother fighting off ‘bad code’ etched in her DNA.
When that story found me, it was for lack of a better term, wonderfully incomprehensible.
To leave you with Kahlil Gibran; “look deep into their heart and you shall find it is only that which has given them sorrow that is giving them joy.”
