Older, but no wiser
Andy Borrows' musings on life and all its confusion, contradictions, richness and opportunities
Saturday, July 17, 2004
Soul :: part 1
Words. Intermediaries, carriers, transporters of a kind: transporters of experience.
Experiences occur – as whole, complete undivided events, but thought and words and ideas can’t readily handle such wholeness, so I divide these ideas up, package them into little parcels called words and send them streaming off to you. You unwrap them, and with a touch of magic reconstruct an experience from them. I do the same with your words too, and if the magic is particularly powerful, every so often each of us knows the thrill of experience shared. For a brief moment, our isolation is broken and we connect - understanding or love or fear or pain or happiness or sorrow crosses a chasm that may be inches wide or spanning the earth. Bridging a gulf of years, or even the final gulf of mortality.
There is joy in that moment. Not only the deep insight of ‘A-ha’ moments, but also in sharing the simplest and most mundane of experiences. The joy may be in the content, the substance of the experience, but it can also be in the simple factof true communication; the recreation in me of something that is in you, whether physical, intellectual, emotional or spiritual. Perhaps my heart beats faster, or tears flow, or my spirit soars. Or perhaps it is simply that I can say “Yes, I’ve been there, I’ve felt that too. I know…”
There is but one essential prerequisite that must be fulfilled in order to be able to communicate, and it has very little to do with language or skill. It is simply that you or I have to have experienced something in the first place. To have something that we want to communicate. Truly experienced it, engaged in it with our whole selves, with an awareness that encompasses body, mind, heart and soul. After all, even something as seemingly dry as a text book works best when the soul of the writer comes through in their enthusiasm for their subject.
Experiencing – truly experiencing – seems to have been difficult for me of late. The world has been going past behind a filter; perception has acted as a kind of inverse sieve that lets the coarse chunks through but blocks the subtle detail.
But at long last I have an inkling of what’s going on. To explain though, first I need to backtrack a couple of months.
To be continued…
Experiences occur – as whole, complete undivided events, but thought and words and ideas can’t readily handle such wholeness, so I divide these ideas up, package them into little parcels called words and send them streaming off to you. You unwrap them, and with a touch of magic reconstruct an experience from them. I do the same with your words too, and if the magic is particularly powerful, every so often each of us knows the thrill of experience shared. For a brief moment, our isolation is broken and we connect - understanding or love or fear or pain or happiness or sorrow crosses a chasm that may be inches wide or spanning the earth. Bridging a gulf of years, or even the final gulf of mortality.
There is joy in that moment. Not only the deep insight of ‘A-ha’ moments, but also in sharing the simplest and most mundane of experiences. The joy may be in the content, the substance of the experience, but it can also be in the simple factof true communication; the recreation in me of something that is in you, whether physical, intellectual, emotional or spiritual. Perhaps my heart beats faster, or tears flow, or my spirit soars. Or perhaps it is simply that I can say “Yes, I’ve been there, I’ve felt that too. I know…”
There is but one essential prerequisite that must be fulfilled in order to be able to communicate, and it has very little to do with language or skill. It is simply that you or I have to have experienced something in the first place. To have something that we want to communicate. Truly experienced it, engaged in it with our whole selves, with an awareness that encompasses body, mind, heart and soul. After all, even something as seemingly dry as a text book works best when the soul of the writer comes through in their enthusiasm for their subject.
Experiencing – truly experiencing – seems to have been difficult for me of late. The world has been going past behind a filter; perception has acted as a kind of inverse sieve that lets the coarse chunks through but blocks the subtle detail.
But at long last I have an inkling of what’s going on. To explain though, first I need to backtrack a couple of months.
To be continued…
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