The Strange Thing
What we call life is a kind of constant stream, a flow of perspectives, one after another. And they don’t feel like strange perspectives. They arrive with a sense that everything fits together.
This is how it is.
This is the situation.
It’s obviously this.
And yet not one of these seeming situations can be found in the way it appears.
It’s astonishing. It’s absolutely astonishing.
Things seem to be one way, and yet when we look, nothing is established in the way that it seems. The seeming itself goes so much further than anything we can actually find.
It’s fucking astonishing.
And yet it so easily goes unrecognised. We might spend decades, perhaps the whole of our life, our precious life, without noticing this extraordinary distinction.
And here’s the rub.
The perspectives that appear don’t come along empty-handed. They carry their own implications. Before we know it, those implications are already moving us.
I must do this.
I can’t let that happen.
This needs to be sorted out.
The degrees of freedom become very small, very quickly. From inside the perspective, there hardly seem to be any degrees of freedom at all. The situation appears to contain its own necessary response.
And this movement feels inevitable and obvious. This is the way it is, after all.
But that isn’t quite where I’m heading.
The stranger thing is that when we look, the situation itself doesn’t resolve. What is found doesn’t collapse into the seemingly obvious.
It is far more mysterious and strange than that.
And this is where the words begin to fail.
We can say it is unresolved. Completely intimate. Absolutely specific. Alive. But none of those words can give it to someone. It has to be noticed.
It is like coming upon an old wooden door in a stone wall. Perhaps we have passed it many times. Approached it from different directions. Tried to understand what might be behind it.
But then, for some reason, we stop.
We let go of what we think we know.
We ask, what is this?
And the door opens.
What is there cannot be represented directly. It is impossible to say what it is. And yet we are there. It is completely intimate.
If you want to look a little closer, wander down the path near the garden door.