Ah, Secrets

 It is only when I know secrets that I feel really grounded.  When I learn some central secret, a guarded, unavailable truth, I calm down and look out upon the world with equanimity.  Things add up.  I breathe deeply.

When I was a child there were no great lies that I ever knew about, but many important things were never said.  There were deep denials of silence, and sometimes silence was timeless to the small perspective of a child.  I didn’t know the questions to which there might be answers.  I now know probably only a few.

When was my dad gone?  For how long?  Where was he?  What has upset my mother?  What is she thinking behind her fearsome, red-eyed, deeply inward-turning face?  What old fissures in her being is she feeling?  What new injury has torn her open and sent her away?  What is it that they find so impossible? 

I know if they ever could have named these things there would be many names, and they would scarcely have agreed, or even understood the terms.  The Big Problem for a couple is always at least a double problem, one for each.  But I never heard even their terms. 

If I had heard their terms I could have struggled with confusion, and thence had some direction.  Silence, though, is trackless.  A child in silence like that is a lost satellite, flying with no orbit.

I have never penetrated much of this original murk, and now all of the potential informants are dead.  Still, growing up that way had some benefits.  For one thing, I have made a business of wading into such inchoate silence and the opaque babble of conflict.  I have developed a tolerance for the lostness because it is not unlike what I have always known. 

Meaninglessness is familiar.  I listen and watch.  I search for hearts, and they stand out visibly enough.  They would be embarrassed if they knew how visible they were, but they are entirely secure and hopeless in their sense of invisibility.   They are like children who do not guess that anyone is watching.  Seeing them is just the start, though, a long way from knowing and understanding them.  I wait and suffer the clouds of swirling emotion until words occur to me that they might speak if the hearts could speak.  Then I try speaking the words that occur to me and see what happens.  At times people feel heard and expressed simultaneously.  Hope occurs to them.  Then they hear each other a bit while they are somewhat disarmed from not having to fight old fights to be heard.  They look at each other slightly stunned. 

After the session the old issues will arise again and trigger the same scripts of pain and anger, but they will only be 99% captured by this.  The one percent may keep them from too much injury.  At least this is the hope I send home with them.  They come back and we all hope that my continued involvement will find more ways to destabilize their bitter detente. 

Early I longed for the discovery of questions that could lead to the opening-up of secrets.  I could never have named this, of course.  I see it in looking back and putting words to the yearnings that led me to the things that lit up, and past all the things that didn’t.  In seeing this I am seeing one of the most satisfying kinds of secret– a secret about myself.