I was thinking yesterday morning of a children’s toy that I remember, though I can’t recall the name of it. It was a slate with a slightly waxy black surface, and you pushed a stylus into the surface to reveal a rainbow of neon colors underneath. Varying the pressure varied the line you were drawing because the waxy colors were layered like so many narrow striations in the earth.
It seemed to me an apt image for life, which is nothing (in my opinion) if not a series of layers. Experiences layered upon other experiences, moments piled on top of others, decisions guiding us onto a path we may not have consciously sought, people we meet shifting our focus yet again. Many of these things seem as insubstantial as a snowflake while in the midst of it, but somehow they pile into the immovable, rock-like banks of snow we New Englanders know so well in March.
Space, in particular, seems to hold so many layers. Specific physical places are, for me, filled to the brim with potent experiences. Sometimes when I am in a space that has housed a vital life moment, I struggle to understand how that moment has just gone and is not, somehow, existing forever in some alternate plane. There are also places that recur, places we return to again and again. These places hold us throughout our lives, function as both repository of memories and mirror to show us how we have changed.
People, of course, are full of these layers, full of varied substrata of personality and instinct and passion and thought. Getting to know someone, or becoming known ourselves, is really nothing more than an excavation of the layers. Witnessing the pentimento of the basic, essential surface of a person’s self is a rare privilege. Often this fundamental core of someone is as molten as I imagine the center of the earth to be, and vulnerable and fierce at the same time. And of course nothing is permanent, and the layers are shifting all the time; I believe even our essence can shift over time, as important people and choices influence it.
What I am wondering, though, is whether the purpose of life is to strip away all of these layers of experience and memory and influence, to uncover that fundamental seam of who we are or whether it is to go on merrily adding snowflakes to the pile, welcoming the way we are permanently altered and shifted by people we meet and experiences we share? I think I hope it is the latter, though I recognize that the task of the former is a critical part of the passage to knowing ourselves (or others).