Bare-able Lightness of Burdens

Sol Star: I'm sensing you've done things today you wish you could amend, Seth.

Seth Bullock: What kind of man have I become, Sol?

Sol Star: I don't know. The day ain't fucking over.

- - - - -

I wonder often times about the ways in which we are both victims and perpetrators of our lives. Of ourselves. The ways the weight of the past presses us ahead into these places where we feel both at home and ill at rest. And yet the ways in which it is only ever just me making these choices, responsible for these actions. These recurrent actions. These steps and stumblings forward and backward and not at all. No one is their source but myself.

I know some people who are awful. Abrasive, unkind, inconsiderate, uncouth people. People who are messy. People who are inappropriate and ill-equipped for civilized life. And, some of them I really love, though obviously not on their merits. So, why?

Because the ones I love bear (and only occasionally, bare), beneath their scratchy exteriority, a hurt which makes them child-like and worthy of being cared for. Nurtured, even. Certainly treated with kindness.

There are lurking ancient hurts in their souls. Ugly divorces. Naked mistreatment. The ways in which life breaks promises to us that it claims it never made. And probably didn’t. Still, it seems to wantonly allow us to imagine that it did.

And so it is my pleasure to endure their abuse and inconsiderateness and abrasive comportments. Because what greater joy than to communicate to someone, though not necessarily with words (but not necessarily WITHOUT words either) that, though you may push away so fiercely, I will not abandon you.

And that’s what that stuff is all about, anyways. People who’ve been abandoned so many times because after all, they imagine, they are the piece of shit at the center of the universe. People who will push you away before you can leave in disgust at what an intolerable shit-bird of a person they suspect they really are at the core.

But they usually aren’t.

Except. Except the more the outside prickles and spines against the fickle affections that could tear away another wound, the more they make themselves the kind of person they are behaving like. The more that child dwindles and hides and becomes unreachable to compassion. Incapable of bearing the imposition of kindness. The terrifying risk of love.

And in a way, as they persist in their fearful self protection, in their wild swipings at the world, they become much more the perpetrator of their own unhappiness and much less the victim of it. They begin to wreck themselves. To dissolve themselves into bile and grit.

And while its not only their fault, it becomes over time more and more their own fault.

And that is not just a moral failure. Its also a failure of hope and courage and creativity.

It’s a failure to remember that tomorrow is another day and if we can find a moments rest, we might wake with the strength and courage to be the person of abundant kindness and love that we might have been as children.

And that is why I offer my (nearly) unconditional regard when I can. Because everyone needs a place and person where they can rest from the work of scaring off the imagined hurts of the world.

But do I let others be that rest for me? Not without some significant portion of undermining guilt.

What kind of man have I become, Sol? The kind I’ve been made and continue to make, I suppose. Just like everyone.