On Collapsing the Other

"I must respect your otherness because it emerges from the ultimate other, God." —Elie Wiesel

I’ve been reading Witness by Ariel Burger on the teachings of Elie Wiesel as I prepare for my fellowship retreat next week.

My work isn't to collapse other humans into categories I can comprehend—categories based on similarity, quite frankly, based on ME or versions of myself.

The work is to stay in the room long enough to truly engage with difference, not what is familiar. Not the broad brushstrokes that say we all share the same fundamental things. To be witnesses to who people actually are, not judges of how well they fit what we secretly expected.

We don't require similarity to connect, but we do need trust—impossible to develop when we're so quick to assume we already know who someone is based on how they remind us of ourselves.

We must learn to see the other as genuinely other. If I can see the other, the reference text of my own world expands outside of a simple one.

This was written during a kite-flying trip to Colorado.

Building small altars here and now

If you notice the true limits to your energy and time, you will be heartbroken.

It's part of being a person.

It's part of mature adulthood.

Not for all the things that you vaguely desire, but for the things you actively desire that aren't possible.

There is a lot of pain in realizing the lines drawn between this reality and what can be contained inside one human life with the modest altars of meaning we can construct each day.

Possibility can drive us to try, but I can't live in two countries at once. It's not going to happen.

It's hard and I'm going to say it: there are differences we can't reconcile and will never reconcile.

There are desires we have that don't live in the same body, lifetime, or cultural context.

A precondition for a life well lived is to avoid the things that simply aren't possible because you are here, now.

How you get your past back

Aging hands our past back to us in other people grow, and the richness of our inner life.

We get more complex as we turn inward over and over again.

I see my childhood in my friend's children as they enter and reenter the swimming pool. I ate a tiny pizza at the pool and became 7 again.

In our very limited amount of available time, my childhood is felt via textures under my feet—mostly wet and humid, and where brick meets mud.

The body remembers what the mind has filed away. Other people become mirrors we didn't know we needed, reflecting what we thought were lost.

Guess what?

They are still there.

I see the wisdom of my life in the hundred-year-old oak trees in my parents' backyard and remember they have been there my whole life, shading and requesting no other gift than a presence that makes things better.

I see myself in spaces between their leaves and where I've stayed in the same tiny holes.

Mercifully, the most important things don't change. And we can be distracted or lazy adults and still keep the most important near to us.

That's blessing in pure form like these gellyfish from the Kansas City Zoo and Aquarium.