Wandering with the Wind...

Friday, January 6, 2012

One thing I find so apprehensive about reading friends' blogs is that the process often undermines the solid - or so I believed - foundation of my understanding of these particular persons. Reading what they write draws me closer to them and yet pushes me so far away at the same time; I realise just how little I knew about them, just how their usual mannerisms and words exchanged are not all that constitutes their mindscape. It's a strange discovery to be made when you've conditioned yourself to always look for meanings underneath the surface. I guess the only logical reason is that I knew, I did know that people had much more to them than what they show in an external stage called the "Society", but I was not prepared. I was never prepared.

It greatly depresses me whenever I encounter such things. Perhaps it reminds me of a form of intimacy that I've always desired for and thought I had attained, only to be shown over and over again that it was not yet time, that we had not yet arrived at that stage, that there was still a long, long way to go. What I'm talking about is a spiritual intimacy, where both sides trust each other enough for there to be a decent lack of secrecy. There's still privacy of course, because after all, secrecy is different from privacy. Privacy is something you are entitled to, something that cannot be shared with another party. Secrecy, however, is when you choose to make something private. It's a choice. It's a selection. It's a mental process. It is when two parties can skip this primal logical process that true trust can be considered forged between them, as there is no longer any reason for such defensive logic to be utilised in interacting.

When I read a friend's blog, often a time it would feel as if I had just lost a friend. I start feeling frightened. I start feeling insecure, because what is revealed to me is a stranger, someone I thought I knew and who had spent enough time by my side to justify my belief. The words they write make their images slip from my mind's eye like slithering sand, and I would watch as this new stranger walks out from the crumbling mess, his back facing me, a shadow I cannot comprehend. I am not worried that this friend would abandon me. I am worried that I would abandon him, as owing to my own foolish confidence in my understanding of him, it is not impossible that when the time comes, I would not recognise him for who he really is.

I love my friends and dearly so. I'm not sure for many cases if the feeling is mutual, but there are certain people for whose happiness I am convinced to do anything that is within my capability. It is a kind of love that I will never be able to foster for communities like my family - people I am born to be with, but whom I never chose to live with. To me, love only has meaning when you have undergone the whole process of choosing for yourself what degree of interaction suits both parties, when you realise that there is a sincere compulsion behind your actions that far exceed the obligatory undertones of societal expectations. In that case, you have chosen to love, not obliged to love. That's a world of difference.

If anything, I encountered these people personally on my own path of life, even if I may have known much less about them than I thought. They are people I chose to be with, and whether they are people I know or people I never knew, I have decided, regardless of the uncertainty, that I would love them all the same.

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~~~*Waited for the Winds at 8.36pm*~~~

Aurinya blogged at 8:36 PM

Roaming the Winds