Today, I wanted to write what I wanted to write. So, that’s what I did. I wrote what I wanted because it was what I wanted.
Now, to you, that probably sounds like a course of events that neither took a course nor was much of an event.
“You wished to do something, so you… went right ahead and did that something. Wow. That was a wild ride, Mike. Great story.”
I know. That declaration sounds about as riveting as someone saying “I wanted to eat some food. So, I ate some food…”
It’s a something so nothing, you can’t imagine why the person thought it was something.
Oh, but they do…
and oh, but you don’t…
…and worse, you just know they’re going to tell you some whole-ass story about it as if it really was quite something.
A person who says those kinds of things never stops there. No, sadly, no… they do not. What shouldn’t have been body copy is, to them, just the headline. There is a whole story below it, and they very much think you need to hear it.
You know the type.
You’ll be out at dinner to catch up and they’ll tee up some stemwinder before you’ve even ordered and then somehow keep it going all the way through the entrée. Throughout, all you can really do is nod, wondering if they just don’t get out much and thus have no other ‘doings’ to report on or just don’t grasp what rises to the level of a ‘doing’ worth reporting on.
They, on the other hand, having thought it was both a bona fide doing and one worthy of report, won’t take your withering nods as a cue. They will not pause to review the internal editorial process that led to them thinking “Person Wanted to Eat Food; Ate Food” was front page material. They won’t stop to consider whether it really needs six columns over seven pages. No, they will very much not. They will just keep going…
And then at some point, dinner will end.
You’ll drive home a little spent thinking “Man, I really love [Wanted Food/Ate Food person]… but, oof, they can be exhausting.”
And they can be. They absolutely can. But they aren’t ALWAYS like that. They’re actually an incredibly attentive listener who cares a lot about YOUR stories when you take the microphone, and they show you that by following up to see how something went or by mentioning it in some future conversation.
They can just talk too much and take up too much of the airtime – and for stories that aren’t even stories.
And the thing is, you entirely know this about them.
You’ve always known it.
You knew it going into dinner the night of the broadcast premiere of the Wanted Food/Ate Food saga. You know it so well, you have it recorded as simply a part of who they are. A personality trait. An attribute.
It is not though.
It is a behavior not a trait.
It is not nature in its display; it is where nurture reaches the surface and finds expression.
It is like volcanic glass. It is a byproduct of geologic activity that happened long in the past which has since been buried well below ground. What can be found on the surface are only its remnants.
Know nothing of that person formation and they are obsidian: made of a kind of glass unlike your own which you can see but not see through.
Understand it and you can understand not just the remnant but its antecedents.
Properties that are foreign to your own can be understood because you see them for what they are: both byproducts of, and windows into, from whence they came.
Their windows might be of a dark glass while yours are clear but each fronts a home with the same two residents inside: a child who once wanted to be loved and an adult who still does.
Standing on the sidewalk unable to see through the windows, we see only the facing – the surface, the affect, the behavior – and notice most the difference from our own.
We see the person who stretches Wanted Food/Ate Food non-stories into Homerian epics and ascribe the excess to just their personality… with some covert judgment. We see difference as defect; and defect as fundamental flaw.
They just aren’t ____ enough or they are too _____.
In truth, the person is neither of those things.
Nearly all ‘excesses’ in human behavior are compensations for what was first a deficit of some kind. We see the excess not the deficit and then form judgments blind to the latter and wrong about the former.
That person who stretches Wanted Food/Ate Food nothing-stories into dinner killers…
They aren’t who you think they are. They aren’t how you think they are. They don’t do that kind of thing for the reasons you think they do; and if you knew the reasons, you’d likely feel a whole lot different about both them and your relationship.
They aren’t clueless in the way you’d think someone would have to be in order to act that way.
They likely do know they ‘talk too much.’ They likely do know they run on too long and end up having consumed more of the airtime. When they have, they likely carry that knowledge with some self-recrimination. In the aftermath, they likely feel bad for having done so… and that feeling bad doesn’t just sit in the shaded area of the Venn diagram where your two circles overlap; it sits entirely in their circle.
They don’t just feel bad about hogging that hour over dinner. They feel a low-key bad about themselves for being a person who does that kind of thing and just did it again.
They just couldn’t help it...
There was something there in the moment so coveted and dear, it was much to resist.
It was something that you once had with such consistency and abundance, you didn’t even notice its presence while they have never fully gotten over its absence.
A person who subjects you to interminable soliloquoys once had to do a lot of internal narration.
What for you was a dialogue with other people was for them a monologue kept to themselves because it either wasn’t safe to broadcast or there was no one in the room.
In you - in your relationship – in their time with you - they have something that for you is just a petty commodity, but for them is a treasure born of poverty.
Show me someone who avails themselves of the chance to tell the long version, and I’ll show you someone who either grew up with, or is suffering now, a deficit of opportunity to just be in rooms where it was/is safe to just be unguarded, open, and present in conversations about anything or nothing.
In the excess is a window into someone whose lived experience was one where the two people in the dialogue – the one speaking and the one listening – were the same person – and it was them. Just them.
At the dinner table, they probably don’t care about the Wanted Food / Ate Food epic any more than you do...
What you are experiencing is a value gap. What for you is just a Netflix-and-chill is for them a day at Disney – and their family didn’t go to Disney. You kinda wanna watch the movie. They don’t want to waste a minute of the day.
What they want is the experience of the -logue not being mono-.
Contrary to what you may think, they don’t want an audience; they want to be in conversation because you offer first a place of conversation. A room in which it can occur and the safety for that to be okay.
If you know someone prone to making mini-series of minutiae, the next time you are with them and they wind up to tell a story, try this:
Interrupt for a second and say “Oh, hey, I want to hear this. Remind me though, there was something I wanted to tell you too.”
If they are the kind of person described above, they will not only shorten the telling of theirs, they will telegraph to you the severity of the deficit behind the original length. The shorter they make theirs to get to yours, the worse the deficit. If they abandon theirs entirely to get to yours, the deficit was so severe, starvation was the diet. They’re used to forgoing meals.
Separating you once was a resource gap. They had little of something you had aplenty.
Between you now is a value gap.
A slab of quartz costs less than a sliver of diamond. The only reason for the difference is because one of them is rare… and it is rare for all of us. There is no place where diamonds are so plentiful, they are crushed and used for patio stone.
Softer things though… love, care, kindness… those we all experience in differing supply, and those differences show up. Scarcity begets adaptation, and adaptation eventually bubbles to the surface. People who have never suffered a shortage see its effect; confuse it for affect; compare it to their own; and see the other person’s as a defect.
What they are actually seeing is not the other person’s deficit; it’s a contrast to their own wealth.
They themselves had a blessed abundance of petty familiars. Simple ordinaries like a living room that could be inhabited rather than just managed; the company of people who could be trusted; and ample time for the great Jaberwocky of mundane communication.
“’The time has come,’ the walrus said ‘to speak of many things. Of shoes and ship and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. Whether the sea is boiling hot and whether little pigs have wings.’” – Lewis Carrol, “The Jabberwock”
Nothing conversation is nothing or conversation depending on the supply.
What for you is just common quartz is for them a diamond. They covet even an eighth of a carat.
That hour over dinner spent enduring the Wanted to Eat Food saga that felt to you like someone being gluttonous with the airtime…
That’s just what shows up when someone spent too long going to bed with an empty belly.
It wasn't an indifference to eating more than their share. It was a product of a hunger.
They ‘Wanted to Eat Food’ and with you, they had that chance.
If you know someone like that, if you’re picturing them now, picturing those kinds of dinners or calls or conversation, just know this:
While they may not have stopped talking long enough to eat much of their meal, they left full, and it was you who fed them.
That's what was going on at that table.
That was the person on the other side of it and how they came to be. It was never quite how it looked. What you probably suffered with some irritation as an injury to you was the product of first an injury to them. While it may have been unbenownst to you – in your relationship, your time, your forbearance – you drew from your surplus to soothe their deficit.
And ain’t that a helluva a thing. From whom has plenty came a gift to they who have less.
Those dinners where it felt like they were subjecting you to something, doing something to you, taking something… you were giving something to them. Something they’ve always deserved. Something we all deserve. Something that is always a diamond even when it is common as quartz:
Human connection.
In the relationship is something precious.
In the experience, it is often missed.
And why am I telling you all of this?
Well, first, because I think it is a big deal. I think it is important. I think it matters.
I think it may be the thing that matters the very most at this particular moment in human history.
We as a society have contracted a disease that is attacking an essential organ. It is the one the produces something so vital, so critical to social health, the body collective all but dies without it: compassion.
We are living in a time where the ideas of individualism and competition have mutated into a grim selfishness and indifference. That mutation is metastasizing in front of our eyes into something dark and despairing.
These are not warm times for the warm-hearted. Something must be done to fight the cold.
I think that is a call we all need to hear right now.
I’ve been hearing it.
Well, I’ve been hearing a larger calling. It hasn’t been about just that. It hasn’t been about the ‘we’ as much as it has been about ‘me.’
It has been a calling to know myself… see myself… see my purpose and step into it fully.
Everything I wrote above about the person at the table is an element of that calling and having long leaned into it. I see past. I see into. I see the engine not the hood, the person not the presentation. It is so practiced, it is just how I see.
This past year put me through some things. (Lord, is that an understatement.) It melted me right the hell down but for a constructive purpose. It was the imposition of heat so as to refine and then forge. It was the necessary means of separating compound into molecule and then atoms so they can find a new alignment free of adulterants.
I have a drive, a passion, a purpose, and a gift.
The first three are earned, chosen. The fourth was merely entrusted.
The drive is to know myself… to find meaning in my experiences… to not just consume them but to digest the whole of them. To take them in so fully there is nothing left on the plate. The good and the bad. The soaring joys and excruciating pain. To consume it all and then… metabolize it. To take the nutrients and process down the toxins. Not just filter them out or spit them out as a remainder. Process them into something different, something that transforms poison into balm.
The passion is to understand other people and what makes them tick - to see not just the body of the car and the marks on it but the way they came to be there – and to use that understanding for a beneficial purpose: to form meaningful connections that wire deep around things that matter.
The purpose is new to me.
My understanding it, seeing it, feeling it, anyway.
I can’t tell you how long it has been in existence outside of my field of vision, but I can tell you it has been coming into focus for some time. It is like an object being found through the lens of a camera. You are aware of its presence but not its nature. As you turn the ring around the lens, the picture sharpens until you see it clearly and cannot be made to not know what it is there again even if it slips from focus.
The purpose is to combine the drive and passion toward a beneficial good. To harness my metabolizing of my own experience, my own joys and sorrows and pain, in concert with my aptitude for really seeing people for who they are… and for seeing the things that bubble to their surface as the long story of how they came to be.
In that combination is the opportunity for something profoundly meaningful to me: creating gain greater than an original pain. Converting things that hurt into things that heal. Making people feel seen and understood and less alone. To me, doing so is turning hard earth into a field where flowers grow. It is filling a long table so that everyone has a place to eat joined together in community.
Those first three… drive, passion, and purpose… those are mine.
I chose them.
They are a nature chosen after nurture.
They are who I am because they are who I choose to be.
They are not only enough for me, they are the ingredients for a remaining life I will be able to look back on and see as well lived.
Those are mine. I chose them. I honed them. I maintain them. They were and are choices to see light even in near darkness by seeing the whole of me and the light in others.
The gift is something different.
It was simply bestowed upon me. I did nothing to earn it. It was simply something given to me. That stark opposite between effort and receipt is not lost on me. In fact, it has been ever present these last two years. It has felt like a gift given.
Now I see it for what it is: a tool entrusted.
The gift is being able to write.
While this may make sense to no one and resound as hyperbolic or grandiose, it is nonetheless something I have come to see as simply the truth of something.
I have done nothing to earn the ability to write. I may not be Shakespeare or Hemingway. I might not always write well or ever write with soaring brilliance. I might not produce work that wins accolades or awards or even a good living.
However, I, at least occasionally, write things that people feel… things that touch them or move them or meaning something to them. When that happens, the people reached are often the ones who could use that connection of heart to soul most.
In that is the most profound of treasures.
It is gratifying in a way that defies description.
For me, in every one of those small moments of meaning is a life being well lived toward something greater than myself. It is the ultimate alchemy. The ultimate act of reclamation. It is the production of a something that defies natural law: a gain greater than its pain, a healing greater than the harm from which it grew.
I can think of no better triumph over adversity than to turn it into a tool for others’ peace.
Last year came with an impossible volume of lessons for me. I’ll tell you of them some time. I needed to speak first of their effect in aggregate because much in my life is changing around it. I’ve been pulled out of orbit to find my true center of gravity. Having found it, things are simply coming into alignment which is different but feels like the finding of a natural order rather than an adjustment to its disruption.
I have a clarity of purpose.
I have been entrusted with a tool in service of it.
I see writing as a gift given in trust.
I intend to honor it.
With that said, today, I wanted to write about something so I went ahead and wrote about it. It wasn’t this far longer preface. It was the piece I wrote before starting this one which I will now post next.
Ironically, after all this talk of humanity, it isn’t about a person at all. It’s about a cat. His name is Nelson. He has been in ill health lately. I’ve been thinking about him. I have a particular soft spot for him. Having now read this, I think you’ll understand why.
But why the long preface?
Because sometimes wanting to eat food and then going ahead and eating food actually IS a big deal.
Sometimes it requires first coming to know your own appetite and then accepting that it simply must be fed because it is what sustains you…
and because, in realizing that, you suddenly understand why you’re here.
[Oh, so, that tentative knee-knocking in my last post about not knowing whether I was back… suffice it to say, we’re past that. The kitchen is open. I won’t turn out the lights again until life turns out mine.]
Coming immediately after this is a fond ode to an ailing cat. It is a lighter, shorter, easier read than this was. It is called “Lord Nelson, The Gentle Best of the Citizen Six.” Behind it are a slew of others in development. There’s “The Art of Eating Alone” and “The Blessed Abundance of Petty Ordinaries” and “The Thing the Shortstop Heard” and… and… and. The kitchen is astir. Last year saw many a fast. This year, we eat.
(Granted, the pantry is low, the budget is fraught, and my outages laid waste to reserves. Still, we will eat. There will just be some hard scraping to keep up the enterprise. The emotional wreckage from 2024 is getting cleaned up. The financial wreckage will be harder. I’m not suffering that lightly but as they say “It is what it is because it was what it was.” In the meantime, let us sup… I have a story about a cat. It’s up next.)
“Show me someone who avails themselves of the chance to tell the long version, and I’ll show you someone who either grew up with, or is suffering now, a deficit of opportunity to just be in rooms where it was/is safe to just be unguarded, open, and present in conversations about anything or nothing.”
Oof. What a gut punch. Now I’m crying.
I feel embarrassingly seen.
But also safely seen. Soothingly, even.
Understood. And welcomed ❤️
1. As someone who has wanted to a thing today, and 3 or 4 hours later, still hasn't yet started, I understand the impressiveness of wanting to do a thing and then doing it.
2. I've been kind of Jane Austen obsessed since last fall, all the movies, books, modern retellings, etc. So this reminded me of the part in Emma in a modern retelling where they were out to dinner and the Miss Bates character is going on and on and Emma embarrasses her and Knightly is mad because Emma has it all and Miss Bates obviously is so happy to be at the table. And so Emma feels bad because she realizes she just needs community. What she once thought of as annoying she starts to see past. And oh how we are all going to need as much community as we can get now.
3. I'm glad you are back, this is terrific. Can't wait to see where it is taking you.