—
What are you doing over there old man?
I am trying to detach from beliefs that are not consistent with my personal experience.
Oh, so you know it all by now then?
That has not been my personal experience.
So, the world revolves around your personal experience does it?
That has not been my personal experience.
What has been your personal experience old man?
That you are very angry and lost.
I am angry that I wasted my time talking to you.
I am not.
◊♦◊
I’ve never had this specific conversation with anyone, but believe that this is a form of conversation had by many old men in response to the question by a younger man as to how they are doing.
As an old man contributor to the “Conversation that nobody else is having” via goodmenproject.com, I often find comments to what I write to be of a similar nature as to the above. That is comments by men, who I believe to be younger than I, attacking a personal story that I have shared. Usually the attack is not on the content of the story, but on how I told it. They often take the form of “you wrote this, therefore you must mean that and you are so wrong.” Never mind that when I wrote “that,” I didn’t mean “this” at all. Comments often are wandering rants against some misunderstanding about what I wrote.
Sometimes comments complain about what I left out of an article. They take the form of “you dare to write about that, without mentioning this? Well, let me just tell you about what you left out.”
I was young once. I was much more angry then. I had a gut level feeling that what I was being told to believe was not consistent with my personal experience. I was often preoccupied with being offended, not realizing how much this process was shaping me to act on what I didn’t believe, in with little questioning as to what I was doing.
Young and old, we need to wear some sort of mask in order to make our way in society. We may long to be able to swim in the sea of culture and be able to breathe the water like we do the air, but it doesn’t work that way.
We make think that we can sit on our island and not get wet, but we can’t. What we can do is respect that all we meet are wearing some sort of breathing apparatus that distorts their speech. What we can do is listen more carefully to become grateful as to how another’s person experience can became part of out own.
As an old man, I never want to be done learning from younger men and in the process help them feel less lost. Personally, I like to mostly keep to myself. The deep conversation I am most likely to have with younger men, is the one I am having with you as you read this. I guess you can’t really call it a conversation. We are not likely to have any back and forth. It is my hope that my personal experiences, as posted on goodmenproject.com, may inspire your reflections as much as thinking about what I was going to write here inspired mine.
—
—
Photo Credit: Getty Images