In Absentia

I am a reticent man. I am reticent, and I am only getting more so. I'm not sure this is really much of a problem, except on occasion I am called upon to be revealing, intimate, vulnerable. Last night, I was at a meeting and we were all asked to make “personal check-ins” around the table, and as the arc of revelation approached me, the tone became increasingly personal. Let me add as an only partially-relevant aside that I was the only man at the meeting. Anyway, the person next to me described a saga of suffering and humiliation that would make Dido's seem like a sniffle, and then the baton was passed to me. All eyes looked expectantly, and I demurred.

Now, this was a meeting at the church, and we are all members together of a caring ministry, and I am certainly full of compassion for my suffering fellow servants. I suffer too, though not in any particularly spectacular fashion, and maybe it's my knowledge that my sufferings are so mundane, so much of the condition of this world, that makes me disinclined to call attention to them. I ache, I yearn, I am disappointed and enraged; I am anxious, afraid, depressed, and confused. Who, then, is not? How do the particularities of my situation trump the generalities of the human condition? I know life well enough to know that nothing I am experiencing is any novelty whatsoever – and I know life well enough to know that I don't know life that well. I don't travel; I have never married and have no children; I have not been in a fight since I was ten; I have never been in prison or in the midst of a war; I have never been sick enough to be hospitalized, nor broken enough to be mended; I have known neither great love nor great hate; I have no great quest to fulfill nor enemy to conquer. I am ordinary. Exceptionally so.

So this is the challenge and the paradox: living this life (and, this month, chronicling it) while doing the best I can to take the subject at the center of it, and concealing him. But somehow, he is revealed regardless, and known, in all his quotidian invisibility.

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Comments

[Becky Says]

I am slightly more open, but I hate, with a blazing passion, being informed that I am *expected* to share personal stuff.   Good on you for demurring, since that was what you pleased to do.