Harold Pinter once wrote, “One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.” By nakedness, Pinter was talking of the most hated and avoided aspect of the human condition, one which is more often deplored than lauded: our vulnerability.
I recently spoke to a friend of mine who will graduate this spring and is coming to terms with the fact that he will most likely never ski competitively again. Having dedicated thousands of hours to honing a craft and spending most of his life being identified as “a skier” — a damn good one at that — he was done. He looked at me with a mixture of pain and joy in his eyes and managed to sputter that he can be anything he wants to be now.
It’s a weird moment to finally realize that you are in fact the captain of your soul. Too often, we seek validation in the opinions of others. For what could be more terrifying than looking within ourselves for approval — more terrible than staring the nakedness dead in the eye? Pinter wrote of disclosing to others our inner deficits as being “too fearsome a possibility” to consider.
It is difficult to acknowledge our shortcomings, particularly for us supposedly successful Dartmouth students. This is not a column intended to encourage a mass disclosure of personal struggles. Rather, it is a call to recognize that though we each struggle with doubt and pain from time to time, we are not alone. We must recognize that the barista at Dirt Cowboy, that mean history professor and the guy snoring in front of you in class do as well. So give them, and yourself, a break. When we embrace imperfection, life gets a little easier. It gets even easier when you recognize imperfection in the people around you. Hell, we’re all just trying to get by.
I just re-read “Life of Pi.” At its core, the story is about the horrors of life and how we’re all just doing our best to deal with these horrors. Tragedy strikes, the people we love die and the world keeps spinning. Our knee-jerk reaction is to scream and shout. After all, we have a right to feel this way. What can silence do about the injustices of this world?
But some silence is important. Before we raise our voices and move mountains for all the causes we believe in, we need to take a step back from the noise and fall into the quiet. Embracing silence, nakedness and our vulnerability.
I am stubborn. I am arrogant. I am not as smart as I think I am. I miss my mum. I don’t talk to my friends from back home as much as I used to. I say I’m a feminist, yet I knowingly deceive and upset women. I don’t remember what my dad’s voice sounded like. I love One Direction. I think my brother has a drug problem. I think I’m depressed. I drink too much. I still love Manchester United. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I am vulnerable.
Each day, we should try to be honest and sincere. Recognizing the vulnerability within ourselves will help us be considerate of the crosses that everyone else around us has to bear. What I listed above is a small sampling of what I carry with me, and it is surely dwarfed by others’ burdens.
Some people say that everything is relative. Further, many proponents of this methodology say that objective truth cannot exist. And so it stands, that people from different cultures and backgrounds will view single events in myriad ways. But what is certain, what is objectively true, is that one thing common to all of us, at the essence of human existence, is our capacity to think and feel.
So, in a world of such immense difficulty, filled with such pain, we can (and must) move forward, knowing that our journey, though unique, has pain and joy that is mirrored in the lives of those around us. Ultimately, though we are vulnerable, naked and unsure; we are not alone. It is good to be human.
