Life After Darla lyric sparks reflection
One of my favorite lyrics penned by my talented friend and vocalist, Elevator, reads as follows:
"...we could walk the same paths in life,To me this deceivingly simple lyric describes one of the most fundamental struggles of existence: being alone. No matter how intimate a friendship, no matter how close the connection to our families, no matter how deep and true a love might be, we are, as humans, created as a singular entity.
but we might never cross..."
As singular entities we cannot share the thoughts of others. Therefore, our struggles, our fears, hopes, dreams, passions, anxieties, realizations, and perceptions are confounded "within" our hearts and minds. As an example, imagine your first kiss. You had emotions, sensations and thoughts that were very real and palpable to you. But how did the other person feel? Did he/she feel the same way? You might answer yes. Did he/she have the same sensations, the same thoughts? The answer is simply no. He/she had their own experience, their own sensations. No matter how close his/her experience was to your own, it was different, it was unique, it was theirs. They had no more power to express to you their experience than you had to express to them yours. The connection (if any) was imperfect; flawed. This is being alone. This is walking the same path as another, yet never crossing.
Unique are our thoughts, singular are our doubts, in solitude do we perceive the world around us (usually hoping/imagining that our perception is true and shared with others), but even with this hope all we have is but faith, faith that we, in fact, do share this world with others and that one day we might be able to truly share our lives.
Don't accuse me of supporting any sort of existentialism, nor being too fatalistic. I happen to have convictions that account for the fundamental awareness mentioned above, yet even my convictions can only bridge the gap so far; it's this remaining gap that I speak of. Of course, this is a gap, mind you, that most people spend their entire lives in. The gap is only real (and apparent for that matter) from the horizontal perspective, i.e., the relationship between oneself to everybody else.
The horizontal perspective shows us as weak, contained (at least to our bodies), and mortal. Moreover, and what Elevator's sublime lyric brings out, is the horizontal inability to perfectly connect with another. This reality, from the horizontal perspective means that we might walk the same paths as many around us, and many that have come before us, yet, indeed, we might never cross.
Where does the answer lie? If the awareness written about above isn't fatalism, if it isn't existentialism, how do we avoid melancholy or worse, depression?
Dostoyevsky wrote that we can never truly understand joy unless we have acquainted ourselves with suffering. So too it seems that living a life as a singular entity makes us appreciate and truly enjoy all the more those moments where a connection is expressed in word and action. When I hug my wife and she responds with kind words, though there may not be a perfect unity there is still a great joy and comfort. Without being created as a singular entity would our love relationships be rewarding? Would hugs, kisses and kind words mean anything at all? Perhaps Dostoyevsky is correct, perhaps without the struggle of our solitary existence we would never be able to know the joy of being close.