Back to the Start

I met this girl and I would like to tell you how it happened, if not for you, then for me, just so I have it on record, just so the historical revisionists cannot take their grand liberties with it. It was three weeks ago this past Sunday. I was walking out of the front door of church as she came bounding down the stairs in front of the side door. I made some comment about how I didn’t know you could use that door. Admittedly, it was not the best ice-breaker in the world, because such a comment doesn’t really lead to a larger conversation. It did not. And we said goodbye four seconds later.

And in some parallel dimension, that was that. I never saw her again, she never provided me with this very blog-fodder, she would not be cause for any sleepless nights, nor would she occupy anything more than a footnote in my life’s story, if even that. But in this version of the story, the actual one not the imagined one belonging to some far off dimension, for reasons that are not yet immediately apparent to either of us, our end was not meant to follow so closely to our beginning. And so it was that as she meandered through the parking lot in search for her car, we crossed paths again, this time more substantively, which led to my getting her email address, which in turn flowered into our first date, which in turn, blossomed into our first non-date, but I’m getting ahead of myself, and I cannot help but feel like I’ve left something important out already. So let me, as must so often be the case, take a step back before we can again move forward.

You can understand my initial temptation to start the story at the point in time when we first said hello to one another. It’s a nice, neat, easily-demarcated starting point. But that’s not really where the story starts. The story really starts about 200 seconds before I first said hello to her, when my gaze, quite accidentally, fell upon her gaze, if only for an instant, as I walked out of a classroom and into a hallway inside the church, the outside of which was the scene of our first hello. We looked at each other for perhaps a tenth of a second, so small a sliver or time that it’s a wonder I even noticed, a fraction so insignificant that, though I’m yet to ask her, I doubt she even remembers. And the question that pre-occupies me at the present moment is: how much of what is to come of us was determined in that tenth of a second?

As I may have mentioned in a previous post, Socrates once said that all knowledge is merely remembering that which we once forgot. He said there was a moment in time, at birth perhaps, maybe just before, when we knew everything that we would ever know. The whole of our lives, peppered as it is with ah-ha moments and episodes of déjà vu, then, is spent recollecting and reconstituting that scrapbook of knowledge, which in some sense, was already complete before we started the journey. Suppose the same is true of relationships and that moment of omniscient clarity is just before you say hello, in that tenth of a second 200 seconds before everything else. Maybe, then, the rest of it, all that comes after that initial meeting of eyes - the questions and answers, the tentative admissions, the small graces we bestow on one another, the tiny gifts, the profound warmth and occasional sadness, the words we choose, the deeds we conspire to, maybe the whole course of our lives together – amounts only to this: simply returning to that initial feeling, trying to remember what it was that you once knew about that person, so that we may finally arrive at the place, wherever that may be, where we can say to ourselves, “Ah yes, this thing we’ve become, this is how I envisioned it, even way back when.”

It's like a doctor asking you to rate the intensity of sensation deriving from a phantom limb on a scale of one to ten, one being the lowest and ten being the highest, and you then telling him, “Doc, it’s not like a number at all, but it’s a lot like that feeling you get when you find yourself singing along to a song in a foreign language whose meaning you have not yet had the chance to look up.” And if the whole of it all amounts merely finding meaning for the words you’ve already somehow memorized, feeling again that which you’ve felt before, in a word, re-living that tenth of a second, then can we really say that there are any surprises, in life or in love?

Of course, I’m not arguing that we’re living out some pre-destined fate, that we’re merely puppets in the theatre of the gods arriving at tragedy or comedy for the exclusive purpose of Cosmic entertainment. I believe that we do have a great degree of control over our own lives, perhaps even more so that we typically realize. This is why I cannot describe the facts that are about to befall us or the other ones that will escape us. These things have not happened yet, and, thus, I cannot have knowledge of them. What I am suggesting, however, is that our emotional response to the facts, or to the world, or to its people, or to a pretty girl in a parking lot may be decided in the blink of an eye, in the tenth of a second, so quickly that it does not even rise to the level of consciousness. Moreover, the mechanism for determining our emotional response, our metaphorical heart, has been shaped through natural selection for millions of years, and it includes the love songs of the amoeba-people, the poetry of the frog-people, and the story of how Lucy first fell in love, all things belonging to some distant past, all things that once were and already have been, which now belong to some forgotten dream, or exist as only shadow of a thought once held.

And how quickly we dismiss this wisdom or even forget that it even existed. Our eyes and ears are turned outward, our mouths parade out word upon word, and that is where we look for life’s lessons, in externalities. But every once in awhile, in the ancient struggle for self-understanding, there comes along a rogue voice, a Socrates, who reminds us to look inward, rather than outward, to our heart of hearts, to find what we already know. Some hundreds of years before I found myself unable to articulate an answer to her question of why I am even bothering with her, Blaise Pascal wrote, “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.” The Bard, as if himself humming the chorus to the love song of the amoeba-people from eons ago, instructs me, “Go to your bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.”

As I tumble backward through time, trying to gain my bearings, I realize that things would appear far less complicated if only I knew how this would end, and I even realize where I should look for answers. Still, of that prescient wise old heart and of its secret wisdom whispered during that tenth of a second, I have no recollection.