Interiority

Have you ever looked at a photo of somebody that you loved, who has disincarnated from the earth, and found yourself smiling at that photo, just as you would if you met them on your front doorstep?

I've had reason, lately, to spend some time thinking about this - when someone leaves our mortal earth, when I'm most sharply aware, and hurting, over the sense of all of this life-ness that I'm graced to be a part of, but the other being no longer has access to, when a part of my life has been absorbed with time spent with this person, what of the persons interiority gets left behind, here, on earth, amongst us?

Interiority becomes apparent in the sharing, the moments of co-existence, that we have between us, these moments that let me know bits about who that person is, on the inside. Revealed this way, interiority has many layers. There's the outer level, of actions-in-common, of ten-pin bowling games, of hours spent in geography class learning about tundra, of passing the black pepper grinder at the dinner table. There's the limbic level, of likes and dislikes in common, parmesan cheese, Julian Clary, was Red, White or Blue reaallly the best movie? There's the time spent enjoying each others company, comfortably silent on a long drive, passionately ranting about Intervention policy, all of these.

There's that level further down, of deeply knowing, of resonating with, each others fears, anxieties, dreams, visions. There's the shredding heartbreak of having been through a shared trauma, or sharing the raw, cold edged playground bench that we've sat on together on the other side of it. For some people there's fifty years of marriage that captures the shared time/space corner where you can see the movements of one partner echoed in the other as they help each other make dinner in the kitchen. Words can't account for that level of knowing. 'Love' doesn't quite capture the earthed-connectedness that I sense when I hit this core of knowing with another human being. It's not an interaction, it's a tune, a pattern ingrained and intertwined, hummed in the moment.

It's stunning to me to sit in an observant space and actually watch my own responses to other people. No two, no two, of my intonations, my eye-brow raises, my hand gestures, my big-arsed or sneaky-Machiavellian smiles are the same for each person that I am blessed to encounter in a day. Every interaction between two human beings is it's own language. Every single one.

So when I smile back at that photo, of that person now departed, I think that smile might reflect back to the world a small component of the interiority of that other human being. Without myth, without channelled spirits, without resorting to Freudian psychology, pheremonal biology or game theory, we all, each of us, carry around this vast accumulation of a lifetime spent experiencing the interiority of others.

En-souled.

To be honest, there's not much about our world that I can honestly say makes me want to be a better person. This awareness, that I'm sort of a living representative of those people I love so deeply, who have passed from this world, does a lot for helping me to do what I've heard termed recently as 'suck it in'.

Maybe that's X-gen code for inspiration.