A couple weeks ago I snapped a picture of my eldest daughter standing alone on the dock, watching the July 4th fireworks.
As the show began, she stepped away from our little group to get a better view, and stood there alone, with dark shadows around her. I called out, teasing, asking why she’d wandered off from everybody. She replied, “I’m here for the views.”
She meant the fireworks, obviously. I laughed and didn’t think about it again that night. But every time I saw the picture in my camera roll since, I remembered that moment and kept turning that sentence over in my mind.
I’m here for the views.
Not the view…as in the singular thing in front of her. The views. And I know I’m probably reading more into five offhand words than a nineteen-year-old girl intended to give on a night in July. But I’ve learned to trust when a small thing won’t let go of me. It usually means there’s something in it I need to hear.
Here’s what I think I’m still not finished with: for most of my life, I assumed that eventually, if I looked diligently enough, I would find my(self). I have spent a lot of energy seeking a vantage point on my own life, and on life itself, thinking I’d eventually arrive at one clear understanding. A single picture. A self, finally seen.
Instead, what I found inside of my self-reflection was much noisier than that. Old arguments still arguing. An inner critic mocking me, in my own voice, entirely too sure of itself. Griefs I hadn’t finished grieving. Regrets still hovering. Desires still desiring. Not a singular story…but a story of stories. A cacophony of my various parts, some of which I still don’t know how to be around comfortably.
Yet I’ve now come to understand that the goal isn’t eliminating or silencing those parts of one(self). It’s learning to include and see them all.
Paul Ricoeur spent a long stretch of his life writing on the idea that we never arrive at ourselves by looking straight at ourselves. We get there through a detour…through the stories, through what our many different experiences have to say, through what sometimes feels like unwanted inner noise. And as it turns out, if you keep listening, it is all part of a view worth seeing.
I used to think those inner disruptions stood between me and the discovery of a true self. I’ve now come to understand that they are the real thing. All of them. For, the (self) is the sum of what you’re willing to stand in front of.
I lean on Ricoeur’s phrase for this work: seeing with a necessary second naïveté…for that what’s left after the unquestioned assumptions and inputs of childhood break apart, and the adult egoic rigidity we build to replace it…with its certitudes on one side and anxiety on the other…breaks down too.
It’s what leads you back to something you can trust again. Most people get stuck in the middle and become permanently suspicious, or get caught up defending a certainty they know, somewhere deep with, isn’t actually helpful or true. But there’s another way through: not back to mere childish innocence, but forward into something more like the view on the dock. That is, a chosen, wide-open attention partnered with the courage to remain willing to stand in the dark and call it a good view.
Addi wasn’t trying to send anyone a message. I think she just wanted a clean view of the fireworks and no one blocking it. But I’ve decided to believe her anyway, in ways more than she likely meant.
Because being here for the views is the way I want to live: not constantly striving for a single final answer, but standing at a reflective vantage point with all the stories, moments, and experiences until I can be with every one of them and mean it the way she meant it that night, offhand and completely true…I’m here for the views.
I think that’s the way forward that moves us past demanding one final verdict on ourselves (and others!), and into something more like watching fireworks that never give you just one perspective. They give you burst after burst, experience upon experience, each one gone before you can hold it…yet somehow, that fleeting succession is the real show.
Yes, stay with your own experiences long enough, and you’ll recognize you were never alone in the dark to begin with. You were already plural: your(self), and your(self) as another.
And learning to love the second one first is the whole point.
Shane Ash 