They say that chimps and humans share something like 99.4% of the same DNA, and it’s only the fractional difference that sets us apart. This must be all the more true between humans.

I feel this sometimes. I’ll be walking down the street and glance into a stranger’s eyes and, for just that moment, sense that she and I or he and I really are the same in the ways that matter.

But then the moment passes, and we glance away, and feel aware of how differently we’re dressed, or what different tasks we seem to be about, or how very dissimilar our backgrounds must be. We pass as strangers, in isolation.

Glimpses like these fuel a longing I carry around inside to connect. I long to literally and metaphorically lock eyes with friends and strangers in such a way that everything dividing us gets hushed, and the common ground we share – of loves and hopes and wounds and gladnesses, of angers, disappointments, deep, deep yearnings, of being children and lovers, enemies and friends, sexual beings, spiritual beings, listening-to-music beings, surviving junior high beings, of knowing what it feels like to shiver and sweat and laugh and cry – when all of this gets stretched as an enormous field around us. No words would have to clutter the landscape; it could just be there, like us, the silence heavy – or light – with all that makes us not alone.

Rilke wrote once that “at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone.” And it really feels this way a lot of the time. But the longing in me wants to claim just the opposite, and search hard to confirm the hunch.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2004 at 11:00 am and is filed under Bodies, Philosophy, Psychology, Mindfulness, Bridge-building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.