I find people hard.
Especially lots of them. In one place.
There is an expectation that we should all be good at that.
Me.. I am not good at that.
I get awkward and overwhelmed and embarrassed and forget how to speak and I sound defensive (or worse aggressive) even when asked supposedly simple things like my name and I…
I find people hard.
I was at a place earlier where the expectation was that I should laugh a lot. At first I did laugh, because there were funny things happening and people trying to make me laugh, and so I laughed.
Because it was funny.
But then it somehow got harder to laugh.. Not because it got less funny, but because it felt less genuine.
I was laughing because someone was trying really hard to make me do so and even though they couldn’t see me, I didn’t want to disappoint them and somehow it became harder.
It did not quite feel right.
And then.. Well then I became aware that everyone around me was still laughing in all the places they were meant to, and that they did not seem to think this was weird, and they didn’t seem to have kind of lost the reality of it. They still seemed to be having fun.
Me.. I found I laughed less and less.
Because it felt forced. It felt expected. And sometimes I did laugh because it was really funny and that was genuine. But other times I laughed with nothing behind it.. Just because I knew I was meant to laugh at that point in time.
I could feel my heart sinking because once again, I began to feel different and weird and out of place, and then I just wanted to leave. I wanted to run back to my solitude and the wind and the sky and the spaces between, and not be in a place where hundreds of people were all laughing and I was not, but felt I should be, because that’s what you do right?
And there was a horse in the road tonight.
There were all these people and flashing lights and cars and the people were all around it waving their arms frantically like maybe the horse spoke semaphore and I am pretty sure they were between it and the field it had wandered out of to get that extra sweet looking piece of grass, and maybe the grass isn’t always greener on the other side because on the other side were all these strange people forcing it further away from what it knew and from home.
And I think I know how the horse felt.
Because people do that.
They don’t mean to. They think they are helping.
Except what they do is they get between us and ourselves, between us and what we know, between us and Home.
And they do this because they are scared.
We are not in the field, or box we are meant to be in, and so they must fix this and put us back in it because this is so terrifying to them that all they know how to do is try to put it back to how it was before it became something it wasn’t, because if it doesn’t stay how it’s supposed to, well then..
Then suddenly all the fences become a little more meaningless, and those gaps between the railings and the space above and below is suddenly seen for what it is: bigger than the fence.
And the lines they have believed they have to live within start to fade and then there is a period of confusion because the horses are not meant to be in roads, roads are for cars.. Except no one told the horse that so it just sees a hard bit of ground with some really nice grass growing next to it.. Though in reality the grass probably isn’t all that nice right beside a road because it would be full of car type stuff and all that litter we thoughtlessly throw out of the window because someone else will pick it up right? Or because we are too arrogant to take it home to a bin believing we are bigger than nature.
We are not bigger than nature.
We are like those tiny little bars of fence within all that space above, below, around and through. Except at least the fence is just a fence..
Us..
We fence others in, and at the same time fence ourselves in as well.
We climb into our boxes and tell ourselves we have to laugh at the people who are trying to make us laugh, desperately trying to tell the same jokes like they mean it night after night. And when we don’t feel able to do that, we make ourselves wrong and become like the horse in the road, lost and confused and not knowing why people are looking at us funny and waving their arms like there is something intrinsically wrong with us when really there isn’t: we just wandered into somewhere where there was an expectation that we did not seem able to meet.
You laugh at comedy shows.
Roads are not for horses.
And I got out of the show as fast as I could, and I walked into the middle of the road, not at the designated crossing for humans, and I smiled because I could breathe again.
Because you see I know the secret..
Which is that the lines are not real.
The fences are an illusion.
You are trapped by nothing more than a trick of the light…
And if you just tilt your head slightly, you will see that maybe you don’t have to laugh at comedy shows unless you feel it, and that maybe, to a horse, a road is just another part of its field…
Because the horse knows the field is everywhere…
