THEIR LIFE

THEIR LIFE

I drive past people on the street and I try to imagine what their life is like. These aren’t “street people” although there are many who do sleep on the street, these folks are working on the street. They have a fruit cart or an air pump and are repairing bicycles, or are watching a dozen goats. I try to imagine what their life is like and I cannot.

I had an experience a year or so back. I was with a group of very dear, therapist friends. We meet for about 4 weekends a year (for almost 10 years now) at Pine Manor, Gail Warner’s retreat center in the mountains above Lake Ellsinore. Bill White facilitates. We do our own work. We get into our individual grief or rage or joy or passion or fear. We work as a group on stuff that comes up between members. We have come to know each other well and to love each other deeply.

I was sitting quietly in the group after someone had worked. I was deeply struck in the realization that everyone in that room had as rich an experiential life as I did. Everyone had a mother and a father and a childhood and memories and body sensations and hurts and excitement and disappointments and failures and successes and thoughts and feelings and allegiances and EVERYTHING THAT WAS THEIR LIFE and it was completely different from mine. It was one of those experiences that does not translate very well into words. It was as though each of us was a Comet, trailing behind this indescribable, richly patterned, energy and light of a life that was absolutely unique—ABSOLUTELY UNIQUE. AND in those moments of togetherness, of group being-ness, we had somehow met at that point in time and place. An intersection of Comets. In that moment, I believed,… I knew,… that that was not true just for those in that room; it was true for everyone on the planet. I was staggered. I was like a 5 year old child entering Disneyland for the first time. Excited. Overwhelmed. Everything familiar, yet somehow different than ever before. My God, the cartoons are alive. They live!! I would not be the same. (I imagine that others learn much earlier than I that they are not the only one on earth. :>))

So anyway, I’m driving home and everything is more or less the same color; more or less the color of dirt; the buildings, the people, the cars, the trees; everything covered in the grime of dust and pollution and diesel exhaust. (I’m on a major North/South Hwy – Grand Trunk Road (I swear, the other day I saw someone and I was sure that somehow he had become a part of the tree against which he was sitting. He had on a green turban and brown clothes. The colors were the same; the surface texture, the angles of the limbs. I wanted to stop and go over to him and touch him and touch the tree and try to pull them apart.)

And I think to myself, I cannot imagine their life.