The Quick and the Dead

How difficult it is to be open about the things that you really think and hold to and subscribe to when people are so inclined to be ADHD Fox News in their reactions to each other (and that includes all of us, I'm afraid, even those of us who have more discriminating media tastes - which to me these days seems to be no media at all, but I digress).

You can say to someone, "I believe X to be true", and yet you know that this doesn't quite fit what you mean, that you hold to the general flavour of X and yet you don't necessarily hold to all the superfluous stuff surrounding X. But it doesn't feel like there's enough time to go into all of that. You feel like you would be boring your fellow listeners who are getting used to snap summations in soundbyte size.

From within that very short space of time in which we have to do anything at all, people hear that you subscribe to the truth of X; they presume that you must also accept all the stuff that surrounds X, or if you're not then you are picking and choosing to suit your own whims. But is that true, or is that just convenient for people who want things to be nicely set up with X always and ever meaning X and its surrounds? Do you have to accept the surrounds of X, when all you really want is X, because these are how X comes packaged? What if you think that the long-ranging-over-centuries discussion about X took a wrong turn in 1794 and went off on a tangent? What if you want to see things as they are, not as they appear to be in their accumulated and untested state and you cannot hold to the stuff surrounding something that you can hold to?

Some people claim that you are like the New Agey sort of person who eats from spiritual cafeterias if you claim the truth of X but discard its fuzzy or mouldy or stupid surrounds. Especially if you find truth helpful and compelling from other camps and places and times than the one your own camp deems is "right" and "safe". Then your own camp of X people view you with mistrust. And it's true, there are some spiritual cafeteria eaters who do not want to follow things down to their roots or to be have any mess but want to concoct their own thing over here, a fluffy thing called F containing bits and pieces of everything but without being earthed, but that's not what I'm talking about either. In fact, what I am talking about is almost the opposite of spiritual cafeteria eating.

Getting to the heart of things is hard work these days. Seems there is fluffy mould surrounding almost everything. I guess if you are really wanting to see things as they are, and you know that things are shakier than we would like them to be, and that your thoughts grow and change over the years and you really can't sit with conviction and say you are "right" and therefore everyone else is "wrong," you are always going to be misunderstood by people who are desperate to feel safe and who therefore do not have longer than 1.3 seconds to entirely process what you are saying, people who presume that they are seeing you as you are, but really they're just seeing you from their own preconceptions. I guess maybe that's why it's so tempting for us all to vaunt ourselves up into ADHD narcissism - we know that other people see us as too small, that they judge us too soon, that they are quick to dismiss and to scapegoat and to hate.

Unfortunately, they are we, if we are going to be honest. We are judged and so we judge and make others down small.

I think the egalitarian model is much more attractive. I'm fucked, you're fucked. I wouldn't be able to correctly summarise you in 1.3 million hours let alone 1.3 seconds so maybe we would come at a safer place if we agree that other people are both much, much bigger than we can imagine even if they have stupid wrong ideas and are stupid Fox News watchers, and that we are much, much smaller than our pride estimates when we're recalibrating our past wrongdoings and much, much bigger in terms of the depth of our true natures, the stuff that gets iceberged out in the small, small world.

Or something like that, sort of :) I think what it comes down to for me is that I need to discard this childish sort of desire to be understood by everybody, for them to see me as I really am. Or then again ... maybe that's not so much a childish desire as a childlike one, and a future hope.