Trying to have a true conversation with someone, one characterized by honesty, thoughtfulness, and open-heartedness, is about the most frustrating thing in the world. It almost never works right. I make a lame joke, and I see in their eyes it falls flat. They assume we know the same songs and like the same music, but they've never even heard of what I listen to, and I wonder if they actually like music. There is no 'we' in the conversation, not ultimately. I try to make a connection, utter an honest word. Maybe the other does, too, but they seem to speak such a different language that I can't tell if they are saying "Hail", or "Hell," or "Hale," and really, they were just talking about the weather. When a conversation like that comes about, it's about the most wonderful thing in the world--'getting someone,' feeling like 'someone gets us.' The rest of the time, it's like perpetually being on a first date. People tell me all the time about how asking a potential friend to get together for the first time is exactly like hitting on someone at a bar, minus the cultural acceptance.
These divides don't exist only among people of different cultures--although we have that in plenty, too. The divides exist even among people we are supposed to know, supposed to understand, and with whom we are supposed to have some common cause. It's not that I say to-mate-to, and you say, to-mot-to. It's that I say: Don't you love the Beatles? And you say: Who the hell are the Beatles? And we do that, over and over again. The most extreme cases are, in some ways, the least interesting, like when I say: We should provide healthcare for everyone--because it's better for everyone, but even more because that's the kind of people we should be. And you say: Liberals are assholes who are destroying our country.
Is it politics, race, our different generations? Is it a sound-byted culture? Is it a time and era when we hear only what we want to, increasingly self-selecting smaller media pools? Maybe all of those are reasons for the divides among us, like dogs sniffing each other.
But maybe, too, we are becoming less and less human. Not because of technology--sometimes, it looks to me like technology might be one of the only things that helps. Not because of dissolving families and communities. But because we have come to take life so for granted that we think we can easily despise our neighbors, one at a time, and hold on to the two people we like. We grow tired of reaching out in honesty, trying truly to know someone. And what's worst of all: we can always find new people. We'll never run out of people to meet, even if it slowly strangles the very best parts of who we are, as we become less and less interested in being vulnerable to honest conversation.
If spirituality really looks like mature humanity, I wonder if it really means that we would all become more comfortable being vulnerable? Which is really another way of saying: I wonder if spiritual maturity makes every day feel like a first date.
