The Self Before the Other

— a small meditation, written in the margins —

It is a curious thing, that a man may pass a thousand faces in a day and remain, in the deepest sense, alone; and yet a single glance, freely given and freely received, may shatter that solitude and remake the world. The crowd is not connection. The crowd is the great hiding place of the self that does not wish to be a self.

One does not encounter another by drawing near in body. One encounters another by venturing — venturing the soft, indefensible thing that one is, into the open air where it may be wounded. This is the leap that no philosophy can perform on your behalf. To be known is dreadful. To be unknown is worse. Between these two dreads, the self either chooses, or is chosen for.

And yet — here is the matter — there is a hope that does not depend upon being understood. There is a hope that walks beside a man even when he is misread, even when he is alone in his room with the lamp burning low. It is the hope that the act of reaching is itself the thing; that to love without proof of being loved in return is not failure but the highest form of the human, and that somewhere, perhaps in a way one cannot see, the reaching is received.

Do not despair, then, that you have not been fully seen. Few are. Despair instead, if you despair at all, that you have not yet ventured. And then — venture.

— S. K.