Alone

Heard an interesting thought in a movie last night.  The film character posited that we really are alone in this life.  Everyone talks about how you are born alone and you die alone, but in between we are trapped in this body that keeps us truly separate from everyone else.  Even when I am with someone, and feel as though I know him or her, I am really only seeing my perception of that person, which can never be as translucent as I think.

Within ourselves there is so much depth, so many levels.  One day we turn around and discover someone is not who we thought they were - in good ways or bad.  One day someone slips out of our life and we see a glimpse as they move quickly away and wonder what it was that we saw in that moment, something we had never seen or guessed was hidden there.

Some days we look back with rose-coloured glasses and remember snatches of the past exactly in the way we want to remember it.  Some days we imagine down the future and again only see rosy snapshots that exclude the film reel of real life.

So often life is like sitting in a darkened room at night, glancing over and seeing a neighbour flip a light switch that illuminates themselves in a room.  You witness a moment of that person within their own sanctuary, within their own private life, and can conjecture all you want but never really know anything real about it.  Lights go on and off in houses around town, throughout the world, everyone circling in their own life and witnessing experiences from their own eyes.  No one else can really see how they see.

And yet it is not as gloomy as all that - simply true.  Does truth have to be gloomy?  I think there is great and beautiful joy to be found in this life - and all of it comes from the relationships we form.  This thought seems to contradict the idea that we are always alone.  But I guess that is how a spirit reaches out beyond the physical walls in which it finds itself.  Moments of connectivity between mother and baby, between lovers, between friends.  A spark that tells us this loneliness is only physical, only temporary, only for this world's existence.