The Showboat

Time with others begins on Monday morning: a trip to the gym to see my trainer, followed by a new regimen of stretches. A meeting with a classmate who is working in mindfulness, a trip to the library, a literature search, an online classroom, editing someone’s work. There are times when I feel that I am shuttling between different worlds, different people and different needs. And it often seems like that scene in John Barth’s The Floating Opera, where the narrator reflects on the comings and goings of different people, and how he often feels he only gets a very small glimpse or a window into their lives. The narrator compares this process to standing on the bank of a river and seeing the showboats passing by, with a wide assortment of characters on each boat. The narrator does not see all the moments of everyone’s lives, but only really gets to see a few tiny moments, or points where people briefly connect and then disappear.

Does this sense of impermanence make the comings and goings of others seem somehow more distant, or even wistful?

Reflecting on it, I think about how I have often tried to establish a social life based on the idea of helping and being helped, supporting and being supported. I do think it’s important for people to find some ways of serving others, because it uplifts one’s being and skills. A person becomes more of an active element in the interaction, bringing out parts of themselves that perhaps they never knew could exist. This helping mode also lends confidence to a person and gives them a feeling that they can help others in some capacity. It is very grounding also to be able to let another person help me from time to time. Receiving help fully and whole-heartedly can be a way of allowing someone else to bring out their own abilities. But I think the most difficult relationships for me are the ones where there is no particular role that I have to play. Maybe in those situations, I am just somehow being there, with all that I am, and observing what happens. This feels uncomfortable at times, because it doesn’t have a definition of sorts.

This morning, I was reading an excerpt from a book by Maurice Friedmann, which focuses on the notion of Otherness, based on Martin Buber’s philosophy of the I and Thou. What Friedman wrote was interesting to me. He talked about how Buber really emphasized the importance of personal or identity confirmation that relationships can bestow upon people, whether as givers or as receivers. However, too much pandering to this desire to ‘be confirmed’ can, in Buber’s eyes, lead to a kind of cowardice. According to Friedman, Buber maintained that it is better to be true to oneself and risk not being confirmed, than it is to lose one’s true nature and be forever trying to get confirmation.

I am not too sure where I sit with this, but I think that having a perspective of Buddhist teaching and practice, I don’t need to feel that I am ever separated from other minds. It is only an illusion that sees this self as separate. Even in the absence of communication with others, I can still reach out and transfer merits, or even seek out the support of other minds when it is needed. The idea that there is a separate identity that always needs to confirm itself is a burden. But without faith in a natural inter-being, I can see how people feel that need to confirm who they are, to feel validated in some way. I empathize with it, even though I know that there is another way to see life. I can only pray that more faith will allow people to overcome their feelings of alienation.