Banal Platitudes?

Sometimes, it takes a very long time for what is right in front of us to become evident. And sometimes, true depth is hidden in shallow places. And sometimes, we find what we have dismissed as meaningless is indeed so relevant. I’ll give an example: mothers, and fathers too, often throw out almost knee jerk platitudes as pat responses to life’s situations and injuries to their children. For instance, when a parent is trying to show that people can be quite different than how they appear, s/he might say, “Never judge a book by its cover.”

Repeated over and over again, this saying becomes woven so deeply into the tissue of our beings that it pulses somewhere always below the surface. We know its veracity, but do we know it above our own skin?

It dawned on me the other day, as I was mulling something over, that not many people in this world ever truly know us. Besides family, most other people see us enter and exit their own lives as secondary characters, stand ins, extras, or bit parts, but not the leads. (This is natural of course, as we all play that part in our own life’s drama.) They never, and vice versa, have the opportunity to see our character as fully developed.

They see only the cover.

And sometimes they see us as we appear in a scene of their life as the angry woman on the highway who’s late to work. And sometimes they see us as the teacher who waited patiently with her scared student after school. And sometimes they see us as the mom who’s screaming at the camp counselor who was unjust to her son.

But they never get to see inside to see how all of the chapters fit together.

And they never get to see how this or that moment may not be the norm for her but just the straw that broke the camel’s back. And they don’t know that in chapter 2, she was much different than she is now in chapter 25. And they’ll never know how dark chapter 30 is going to be, nor how beautiful chapter 10 was.

So, I was thinking about all of this, and it just made me want to be better somehow- like to try to adjust and tidy up the face that will encounter the world in each moment, lest they assume that I am that exact character they see before them always.

Books are so complex.