you, there

After the chorus rehearsal last night I stopped off at a bar on the way home. Peleg gets up early for cooking school so I knew he would already be in bed.

I got my beer and sat in a corner in the dark looking at the crowd. I was suddenly fascinated by the observation that every man in the room (and the two women but this was a gay bar) was having his own private, personal, unknowable - to others - experience. I was the only man in the room sitting where I was, having my drink, looking out of my eyes, thinking my thoughts. And the same could be said of every other person as well. I couldn't know what it was like to be that person, there, to have come from wherever they had come from, to be going wherever they were going. I couldn't know what it felt like to be them talking to that person, or playing that game of pool, or having whatever personal response they were having to the music being played. The room was filled with feelings, thoughts, histories and plans of every imaginable kind, but only imaginable, not knowable beyond my own. Except for the tiny, obstructed window, cracked open by a conversation where one interior soul shared a personal experience with another, all of that activity swirled around the room unobserved and unappreciated.

A guy playing pool struck the cue with his stick and the cue sent the rest of the balls flying off into an irrepeatable configuration, losing the previous irrepeatable configuration, and soon to be lost and newly created again. The whole room was like that, over and over again, every moment, infinite.

As busy as my own mind is, as full as my life is, imagine multiplying that by every mind and life in the world. What riches. What scary depth there is to this universe.