Singular experience
Life is a singular experience. No matter how close I am to another person, how much we've been through together or learned about the world side by side, my experience of life—even in moments shared with another person—is solely my own.
The human condition—well, my human condition—is to understand and be understood. This is the basis of love and fear and conflict and community, this presence or absence of understanding. It's what brings me together with others and what tears us apart. It creates reference points for me to use in describing or relating my experience to another human, but it is ultimately only a form of shorthand.
And often I let my own experience and understanding of that experience become a placeholder for someone else's experience in my mind and my memory. I tell myself that I get it, I make it make sense (or perhaps I deliberately choose not to) so that I have descriptive language and emotions that I can assign to make sense of my interactions with others.
Because life is a singular experience, this feels like the only way to share in an experience—to see it and hear it and feel it through the lens of my own knowledge, my fear, my memories of my own past, my dreams for the future. To hope and believe that this shorthand is sufficient in the absence of a more complete or comprehensive means of bridging the gap between myself and others.
I am more empathetic and compassionate when I recognize someone else's experience as being similar to my own, especially pain or struggle or hardship. There is a bond or connection created when I see my personal, singular experience reflected in that of another. But this attribution of my experience onto another can be dangerous when I begin to believe that I know what someone else's experience was truly like. The shorthand begins to fail me in my efforts to understand and be understood. I want to relate to another but I allow that desire to be understood to outweigh my efforts to acknowledge the pain and suffering and joy and contentment of another human whose experience cannot ever be equivalent to my own.
It is said that comparison is the thief of joy. And seek first to understand, then to be understood. There is such a fine line between understanding and comparison. Between acknowledging and appreciating another human's singular experience and attempting to equate it to my own. I center myself and fall into the trap of believing I've been there, but it is impossible—even if I have stood side by side with someone in turmoil or in bliss. I do not, and cannot, know.
And that is okay. Not knowing doesn't make me better or worse. But the false belief that my own experience entitles me to have a say in another's experience of life—outside the parameters of upholding human rights and ensuring public safety—is the first step in closing the door on sharing as much of this life as could ever be possible.
What if I could share my experiences with others without needing or expecting validation of them? Or perhaps not needing or wanting approval? Who could even be equipped or qualified to offer approval? There is no one else who has walked my path or driven my road in the way that I have, so who then am I looking to for approval? Acknowledgement perhaps. Maybe even validation in the sense that I want those I interact with to believe that my experiences are valid on the face of them. What if I offered every single human the belief in the face validity of their own singular experience—without having to have had a similar experience or feeling better than or less than another because of the way I feel about my own?
What a world that would be.
I shall endeavor to create that world in my own life, in hopes that my own singular experience is based in a fundamental value of what makes us all so beautiful and creates the space for connection at a deeper human level.
