Singular experience
Life is a singular experience. No matter how close you are to another person, how much you've been through together or learned about the world side by side, your experience of life—even in moments shared with another person—is solely your own.
The human condition is to understand and be understood. This is the basis of love and fear and war and community, this presence or absence of understanding. It's what brings us together and what tears us apart. It creates reference points for us to use in describing or relating our experience to another human, but it is ultimately only a form of shorthand.
And often we let our own experience and our understanding of that experience become a placeholder for someone else's experience in our mind and our memory. We tell ourselves that we get it, we make it make sense (or perhaps we deliberately choose not to) so that we have descriptive language and emotions that we can assign to make sense of our interactions with others.
Because life is a singular experience, this is the only way to share in an experience—to see it and hear it and feel it through the lens of our own knowledge, our fear, our memories of our own past, our dreams for the future. To hope and believe that our shorthand is sufficient in the absence of a more complete or comprehensive means of bridging the gap between us.
We are more empathetic and compassionate when we recognize someone else's experience as being similar to our own, especially pain or struggle or hardship. There is a bond or connection created when we see our personal, singular experience reflected in that of another. But this attribution of our singular experience onto another can be dangerous when we begin to believe that we know what someone else's experience was truly like. The shorthand begins to fail us in our efforts to understand and be understood. We want to relate to one another but we allow that desire to be understood to outweigh our efforts to acknowledge the pain and suffering and joy and contentment of another human whose experience cannot ever be equivalent to our own.
They say 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 our own. We center ourselves and fall into the trap of believing we've been there, but it is impossible—even if we have stood side by side with someone in turmoil or in bliss. We do not know.
And that is okay. Not knowing doesn't make us better or worse. But the false belief that our own experience entitles us 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 we could share our experiences 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 our path or driven our road in the way that we have, so who then are we looking to for approval? Acknowledgement perhaps. Maybe even validation in the sense that we each want those we interact with to believe that our experiences are valid on the face of them. What if we 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 we feel about our 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.
