What are you going through?

I'm thinking again about how little we know about people. About how so much of our interactions with others seem to only scrape the surface or to catch sight of only the upper crust of that iceberg that makes up the human experience. I'm not sure what rules have defined societal politeness, or what deep-seated insecurity pushes forth our most promising features, most polished exteriors but it is a mask. It is a type of performance we put on as we leave the house. Make-up and a "fetch'n outfit" are only in some ways part of that presentation. I think even more so, and perhaps more subtly, we attempt to "put away" the more weighty realities of our lives.

There is that somewhat misattributed quote: "Be Kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle." I used to muse that it would be well placed behind the till at the retail shop I work at ( though frankly, it might do even better on BOTH sides of the counter ). What it insinuates is a call to compassion to realize that any human interaction is informed by a world before and beneath. A world that is riddled quite likely with the full panoply of human hopes, fears, struggles, losses, joy, despair, anger, disappointment, expectations, frustrations, and frail humanity as a whole.

Simone Weil, famous thinker, philosopher, and theologian, wrote that to love one's neighbour meant not asking "How are you?" but "What are you going through?".

It's a daring, dislocating question. And it's one that I feel hesitant to bring up at parties. Most of the time we ask (and assume) to hear about job prospects, kids, and school. Or even worse, we ask "How are you?" in hopes that we only hear "Good".

I work in retail and on more than one occasion I have answered the phone to hear a customer ask the question as a form of greeting, immediately jumping into their product inquiry without waiting for an answer. I somewhat relish cutting them off mid-sentence with an "I'm doing pretty good, how are you?". They're often a bit startled, but not unpleasantly, realizing that we've exchanged a rather profound human question into a cursory greeting, not unlike "Hello" itself.

Now I'm not about to answer the phone at work with "What are you going through?", but I do want to be the kind of person who strives to hold that kind of space for others, just as I often so desperately want that space to be held for me.

I'm off social media right now (well not entirely, but y'know), and much of that is how much it fuels my struggles with envy. "Comparison is the thief of Joy", and that is some of the mechanisms that have us trapped with these platforms. Following celebrities, influencers, or just our most successful and attractive friends. We all put forth the best of ourselves. Even here I write partially to process, but let's be honest, I know I can collect my thoughts into attractive word clusters, and I know how to let that prose sing a bit. It's creative, but it's also performance, it's also in some ways artifice.

This last week I travelled south to visit some dear old friends. A few I hadn't seen in person in nearly a decade, others only a few years. There's something profound and sacred about staying with friends that gets you a taste of their lives. They're in host mode surely, but both families have children and kiddos have a way of injecting a bit of chaos, of opening the closet where one might try and stuff the excess of one's world behind the dam-breaker of a closed door. (I mean this all metaphorically).

Spending a few days with these friends their stories come forth. I learn about religious trauma, fractured family histories, and health struggles. These are not unique stories, but we get to so rarely hear them. The reality is too that these struggles are what have tested, formed and shaped my friends into the compassionate, thoughtful, complex people they are.

Another set of friends I visited has a wonderful child, born with developmental challenges. He's entering school but is mostly non-verbal. What sounds he does make are a mix of cries, or this persistent, infectious laughter. He is generous with his smiles, with his grin that could warm a room on a cold day. Yet just a few weeks ago they were in the hospital trying to source out a fresh complication, uncertainty, tests experts and optimism without guarantees. I can't fathom what it must be like to have a child, a physical manifestation of the collaborative love of parents, and then to be continually faced with the fragility of the thing. It weighs on them, even while it knits them together.

These are just a few stories. The world is teeming with them. Everyone I have gotten to know to any degree of significance holds some struggle, some forming weight that strains at their hearts and minds.

I think of it now as I make my passage through the strange world of post-treatment. I have been grateful to find a community in the Cancer survivorship world where they have insisted that in many ways the more difficult stretch is the season immediately after treatment. When suddenly the path wanders off into an open field. No longer directed by upcoming appointments you are somewhat "discharged" from the medical world's careful watch and sent.... into your own life? Suddenly the emotional and psychological toll begins to make its needs known.

Now too, I face the deeper questions.

I'm not given too much to spend my mental energy on the wearisome "why me" as I know that perhaps is simply not a good question, but more the "what does this mean". Or perhaps, existentially, what do I make this mean? Some folks in naive optimism greet me and say "Well that's great! You're doing well! Now you can move on with your life!"

But I know better. I continue to move through my life. I move as a person who has had Cancer. Who faces the objectively real possibility of having cancer again (I am luckily not one who faces these thoughts often, as others do, but it surfaces from time to time).

I am complicatedly blessed, though, that having been through a rather life-shaking experience, when folks ask, I am able to subtly invite them to share their own. I am now somewhat marked as being someone who has had suffering as an unexpected visitor for a while. I cannot brush away whatever version of its haunted spectre has knocked at your door, or you discovered in your bed or found in your body.

Life is difficult. Life is rich. It is soil in which both death, decay and compost also give way to green shoots and germination. It is both. Anytime you see just the one, know that you do not have the full story.

Someone said, "The grass is greener on the other side of the fence, because it's astroturf".

Don't let envy and the world of human advertising we call social media distort the truth.

Next time we hang out, I wanna hear,

What have you been going through?

*All photos scattered throughout from my recent trip down to Louville, KY and across to Lincoln, IL. They're mine, don't steal them!