SOME CRUDE LANGUAGE IN THIS ONE

There is an iconic monologue In Good Will Hunting is from the character of Sean (Robin Williams) and he says, “If I asked you about art you’d give me the skinny on every art book ever written.  Michelangelo. You know a lot about him.  Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the Pope, sexual orientation the whole works right?  But you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine chapel.  You’ve never stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling.  If I asked you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your favorites, maybe you’ve even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy…if I asked you about war you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? Once more in to the breach, dear friends. But you’ve never been near one.  You’ve never held your best friends in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.  If I ask you about love you’d probably quote me a sonnet.  But you never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable, known someone could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on Earth, [someone] who could rescue you from the depths of hell.  And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever.  Through anything. Through cancer.  You wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hands because the doctors could see in your eyes because the terms “visiting hours” don’t apply to you.  You don’t know about real loss because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself.  I doubt you ever dared to love anyone that much….no one can possibly understand the depths of you, but you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting, and ripped my fucking life apart.  You’re an orphan right?  Do you think I would know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist?  Does that encapsulate you?”   

I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a more eloquent way to say that people aren’t defined by a single moment or thing in their lives.  We can’t take one facet of someone’s life/personality and use that to define who they are.  We can’t look at a single incident and assume we know how that person is—or WHO that person is—because of their behavior in one second.  We have to look at a sum total of our existence, our dreams, our actions, and we have to offer the same courtesy to others.  We are trained to make rash decisions and we so often go off of first impressions that we don’t take the time to find the story and nuance people have.  Everyone has a story. We each have our unique experiences that make us who we are, that give us enough perspective to see things from different angles.  And here is the other thing: even if we have been through a similar experience, that doesn’t mean we understand the entirety of someone else’s experience.  At the most basic level, this is the difference between understanding something conceptually versus experientially.  I will go into more detail tomorrow about what triggered this for me, but it all started with a picture and the thoughts I had about the picture.  Seeing something whether on TV or any media or in a book is not the same as touching it, being there, tasting the food, hearing the music live.  We can know something and then we KNOW something.   

With information (and misinformation) so readily available and with opinion touted as fact, everyone believes they’re an expert in everything.  We tend to think we understand the entirety of every complexity in the world because we can read about it.  We are even audacious enough to think we have the answers to things we haven’t personally been part of.  We think our opinion is needed for everything.  Watching a video on boating doesn’t make me a sailor.  And seeing a picture of me, seeing one thing I’ve built, seeing the messiness (or cleanliness) in one facet of my life is not the entirety of who I am.  The same is said for all of us here.  And to cover all bases, sometimes we need to accept that our opinion isn’t needed in every situation.  Sometimes we just need to be silent and take in the information.  We need to hold space for the experience of others.  Sure, it’s great to try and learn as much as we can about other people, about the things that interest us.  But we can’t assume that we will ever be on the same level as the people who have lived it or that we can know who people are because of one moment.  I can attest to that and I spoke about that later last year when it came to my first impressions of some people that I was very wrong about.  We must leave space, we must appreciate space, and we must give grace for life as it has shaped people and we must not be so arrogant as to think we know their life story from one single image.  That’s why we tell the whole story—because sometimes a thousand words from the picture aren’t enough.