Fourth Form of Madness

I wouldn’t know our neighbours. Seriously, if I passed them in the street I wouldn’t know they live next door to me. I’ve never seen them. I’ve never even seen their cars. And this is the neighbours on both sides I am talking about. The only reason I see the neighbours that live in the house across the street is because they have a big glass panel the whole length of their stairway that links both levels of their house. Unfortunately, they belong to that strange group of people that didn’t learn that glass is see through and usually run up the stairs with nothing other than a flimsy towel guarding what’s left of their dignity. I’d prefer not to see these neighbours.

Do we really know the people we spend most our lives with…..let’s be honest, for most of us, that’s now the people we work with. In such a highly affected and unfair socially constructed atmosphere, if I was a betting person, I would put it all on the number that said “not a chance”. Most work environments are the playgroups of hell. For 8 hours of every day, you are taught how to lie about your feelings and your opinions, how to play a role so as to appease all that keep your arse in a seat and to swallow the status quo of inequality until your all full up yet strangely unsatisfied. The most appalling part is, the more you do this, the harder it is to determine where you begin and where your 9 to 5 cover finishes.

Do we know our partners? Truly? As much as I would love to say yes, this would be my ego talking. We know what they show us. By the fact that we spend so much time with them, allows us to correlate information about their preferred actions in certain situations, or reactions to certain life events. But is the “thinking” that you know how someone will react to something, based on statistics, really the same as knowing someone, their essence?

Now I’m cool with the whole intellectual “nobody really knows anybody else” deal. This happens to be the topic of my favourite lecture I give my mother when she insists on knowing something about someone – the difference between knowing yourself subjectively and perceiving someone objectively. You are the only one you can know subjectively – the only one that has a ring side seat to you – and this still leaves most of us in the awkward position of continuously not knowing who we are. I’m sticking my hand up for this one. I’m not sure who I am, what I believe and what I’ll be willing to fight for or even if I want to fight for anything, from one moment to the next.

Now I am a firm believer in that is why we are here, to learn. To learn all about ourselves from all the life events that can be thrown at us. I signed up for this and just recently I made peace with this. However, I kind of think it’s going to be a long journey to self enlightenment (okay let’s face it, for me it’s likely to be many many many many……..many lifetimes). I guess I was kind of hoping it wasn’t going to be such an isolated and in a way, lonely one.