Feeling Around in the Darkness, Trying to Share a Glimpse of Myself

I have a reputation, I believe, for my humor. I use it to help everyone maintain awareness of life's absurdity. Sometimes I use it to break tension in difficult moments. Sometimes to avoid vulnerability, I'm sure. But sometimes I use it to create connection.

My work organization is undergoing a staff restructuring, with positions changed and redefined. In some cases, people are moving to new buildings and teams--it's a library system with 14 locations. I recently received word of my updated position, including who is in my small group of peers and who my new supervisor will be in a couple of months.

One of my peers sent out an email anticipating the work we'll be doing after everyone is shuffled, eager to get started, and was told to hold off until we have time to transition and get settled. I couldn't help sending the following to our new supervisor as a follow-up:

If there’s one thing I could throw out for immediate attention . . . I’ve seen this as an issue for a while now, but I haven’t been able to get traction with anyone else expressing concern. I’m hoping maybe, coming in with your fresh perspective, you’ll see it the way I do and take some steps to address it.

We have a designated spot for slow pedestrians to cross the driving entry lane into the staff parking lot and drive-through, but nowhere for fast (or even moderately paced) ones to do so. It creates some real confusion and logjams on the sidewalk out front. Thanks for considering.

(Again, welcome. 😉)

Their response:

I have been quietly informed that this wasn’t entirely serious, although I admit for a moment I did think about it… “Hmm… why doesn’t it just say pedestrian crossing… hmmm…”

I will work on my gullibility! 

I sent two short replies:

I used to be surprised when people would tell me they couldn’t tell if I was joking or serious, but I long ago, after hearing it enough times, I decided to embrace it and make it my identity. 😊

---

Also, I really appreciated the kids book I read a few years back—though at the moment I can’t remember which one—in which the two friends are so bothered by the “Slow Children Playing” sign on their block that one of them vandalizes it by adding a colon after the word “slow.”

And now, I hope, the new boss feels welcomed by the fact that I'm immediately engaging in play with them, breaking some of the ice right away.

Though I not sure if it's accurate to say my humor and earnestness are different even though they look the same; often they exist in tandem in the same thoughts.

Ever since I introduced the book in The Solace of Words, where I stopped reading with the mere introduction and afterwards, I have been ever so slowly, lovingly work my way through The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I pull it out about once a week and read maybe three to five pages so that I can savor each new word and definition. Connect with them. Really feel them.

From "About This Book"

It's a calming thing, to learn there's a word for something you've felt all your life but didn't know was shared by anyone else. It's even oddly empowering--to be reminded that you're not alone, you're not crazy, you're just an ordinary human being trying to make your way through a bizarre set of circumstances.

From "On Gratitude"

Over time I began to get a sense of how much we all must secretly have in common. How many of us must be burdened by the same unanswerable questions, muttering the same thoughts to the steering wheel or the shower wall. And whenever I felt alone, or confused, or like a stranger to myself, I knew I was tapping into an undercurrent of humanity that connected me invisibly with so many others who feel exactly as I do, each in their own lives. That's the magic of expressing how you feel, as precisely as you can. If nothing else, it can serve as a powerful reminder to all of us that we're not alone.

On my most recent dip into the book I discovered a word that has been haunting me since, a word that hit home at a deeper level than any other I've encountered in it. While usually I note words I want to revisit and share because identifying with them brings me joy, this one I marked because it scares me so. My first instinct was to never share, it makes me feel so vulnerable.

rivener

n. a chilling hint of distance that creeps slowly into a relationship— beginning to notice them laugh a little less, look away a little more, explain away their mood like it’s no longer your business—as if you’re watching them fall out of love right in front of you, gradually and painfully, like a hole in the radiator that leaves your house a little colder with every passing day, whose only clue is a slow, unnerving drip—drip —drip.

Middle English riven, to rend, to cleave apart. Pronounced “riv-uh-ner.”

I often make reference to feelings of anxiety and insecurity, and rivener sits at the core of those feelings, a gnawing paranoia that I might experience it. I am irrationally attuned for potential signs of rivener, often, I'm sure, imagining hints of it where none exist. Rationally, I know I need not worry, but the emotion persists. Sometimes I can reassure myself on my own; sometimes I have to ask my wife for reassurance--though then I worry that voicing my worries to her will cause her to question why I'm worried and produce the exact result I'm worried about it, will cause her to think she's seeing signs of rivener from me. If anyone wants to know what I'm afraid of, it's this.

It's probably very much related to this:

immerensis

n. the maddening inability to understand the reasons why someone loves you—almost as if you’re selling them a used car that you know has a ton of problems and requires daily tinkering just to get it to run normally, but no matter how much you try to warn them, they seem all the more eager to hop behind the wheel and see where this puppy can go.

Latin immerens, undeserving. Pronounced “ih-muhr-en-sis.”

I mean, I've experienced the drip—drip —drip of rivener before and constantly feel it for myself, so why wouldn't she?

And it extends beyond romance to most of my relationships in general, the hypervigilance for signs of rivener, to friends and colleagues and the like. If people I'm interacting with have unexplained apparent lack of happiness, I automatically hold myself responsible and start looking for things I done or said or not done or said that might be to blame.

On a more positive note, sometimes I think I live my life chasing the high of ambedo.

Ambedo

A Momentary Trance of Emotional Clarity

Sometimes when you’re alone and everything is quiet, you feel a certain placeless intensity that drifts in like a fog. It’s subtle at first, lingering somewhere between fidgety boredom and accidental meditation. Maybe you’re sitting up in bed on a dark morning before the day begins, staring blankly at a spot on the wall, thinking about life. Or you’ve arrived somewhere a few minutes early to pick someone up, and you turn off the car and find yourself alone with your thoughts. You take a breath and look around at the still life of the parking lot: a few shrubs swaying in the wind, the arrhythmic tinking of the cooling engine, the keys still swinging in the ignition.

You begin to sense that something is happening—as when you notice a movie pushing into a close-up but can’t figure out what it is you’re supposed to be taking from it. Details that usually strike you as banal now seem utterly alien. The stitching on your shoes, the tendons moving inside your wrists. The saplings, reaching. How delicate and fleeting it all seems, everything struggling just to exist. You feel a kind of melancholic trance sweeping over you. A rush of clarity, as if you’ve shaken yourself out of a dream. You are here. You are alive. You are in it.

You look around at all the other people who happen to share this corner of the world, and imagine where they came from, marveling that all of their paths managed to cross at this particular point in time. You think back to the series of events that brought you here, your choices and your mistakes and your achievements, such as they are. All the twists and turns over the years. It wasn’t what you thought it would be, and yet you can still look back on all the things you’ve lost, and the opportunities that came and went, and feel a pang of gratitude that it happened at all. And now here you are, feeling a kind of joyful grief for your life, in all its blessings and mysteries and chances and changes.

You look around with a new sense of gratitude, taking in the complexity of things: raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee. Everything falls quiet, and the words start to lose their meaning. It all seems to mix together, until you can’t tell the difference between the ordinary and the epic. And you remember that you too are a guest on this Earth. Your life is not just a quest, or an opportunity, or a story to tell; it’s also just an experience, to be lived for its own sake. It doesn’t have to mean anything other than what it is. A single moment can still stand on its own, as a morsel of existence.

But after a minute or two, you’ll feel your hand reaching for your phone or the car radio, eager to drown out your thoughts with distractions. Perhaps there’s a part of you that’s instinctively wary of lingering too long in any one moment. We can breathe this world in, and hold on to it as long as we can, but we can’t just stop there. We have to keep moving, digging around for some deeper meaning, hoping to find an escape hatch between one experience and the next. So we never feel stuck inside one little moment, one little life.

Latin ambedo, “I sink my teeth into.” Pronounced “am-bee-doh.”

That fourth paragraph, that's what I'm after. Those moments. When life makes sense. When everything makes sense; or, really, feeling contentedness that nothing needs to make sense. Those moments where existing is magical. They make everything worthwhile.

In a post a while back, I made reference to an article titled To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This. It described a process for jumpstarting intimacy with others. A key moment in that process is to stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes.

Staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life.

I've come across other sources with similar information, and have, as a facilitator, led groups getting to know each other in pairing off and spending 60 seconds holding direct eye contact with each other.

Opia

The Ambiguous Intensity of Eye Contact

So much can be said in a glance. You feel such ambiguous intensity, looking someone in the eye—it’s somehow both intrusive and vulnerable. Their pupils glittering black, bottomless, and opaque.

The eye is a keyhole through which the world pours in, and a world spills out. For a few seconds, you can peek through into a vault that contains everything they are. Catching a glimpse of their vulnerability, their pain, their humor, their vitality, their power over others, and what they demand of themselves. But whether the eyes are the windows of the soul or the doors of perception, it doesn’t really matter: you’re still standing on the outside of the house.

Eye contact isn’t really contact at all. It’s only ever a glance—a near- miss—that you can only feel as it slips past you. There’s so much that we keep in the back room; so much that other people never get to see. We only ever offer up a sample of who we are, of what we think people want us to be. And yet, how rarely do we stop to look inside, let our eyes adjust, and try to see what’s really there, the worlds hidden away in the eyes of others.

You too are peering out from behind your own door. You put yourself out there, trying to decide how much of the world to let in. It’s all too easy for others to size you up and carry on their way. They can see you more clearly than you ever could. Yours is the only vault you can’t see into, that you can’t size up in an instant. You’ll always have to wonder if someone might come along and peer into your soul. Or if anyone out there will put in the effort, trying to find the key.

We’re all just exchanging glances, trying to tell each other who we are. Trying to catch a glimpse of ourselves, feeling around in the darkness.

Greek όπιο (ópio), opium + -ωπία (-opía), of the eyes. The word pupil is from the Latin pupilla, “little girl-doll,” a reference to the tiny image of yourself you see reflected in the eyes of another. This idea was the origin of the Elizabethan expression to look babies, which means “to stare lovingly into another’s eyes.” Pronounced “oh-pee-uh

Though I probably wouldn't have shared this definition without that final paragraph. I love the poetry of it.

We’re all just exchanging glances, trying to tell each other who we are. Trying to catch a glimpse of ourselves, feeling around in the darkness.

That's the truth of the concept I was actually compelled to share. That's what it's all about.

The need for connection and the fear of failed connection.

Aye, too true:

Every reasonable creature knows that the worst thing any creature can do all day is think of themselves. If there are troubles in your mind, you should think first of the troubles of others; it is the essence of liberation. That is, freedom begins the moment we forget ourselves.

― Dave Eggers, The Eyes and the Impossible

If only it were as easy as it sounds.