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The Heart Journals

Journal Entry:

Bounding Through the Woods

     Today my friend and I were sent into the woods to find some lumbar to build a house. We hopped on this little tractor and away we went down a beautiful forest-lined lane. I was driving. Everything looked so spectacular. The sun was shining through the raindrops on the trees creating little prisms of light everywhere. At one point, my friend said to stop. Over to the right there was a steep inclined ledge that plateaud into a brilliant forest scene. The kind in which you could just picture fairies and elves lurking behind every branch. I watched as my friend climbed the cliff and went bounding into the majestic scenery. His walk through it looked so effortless and free. I thought how nice it must be for him to be walking in such beauty. I stayed down on the tractor for awhile and wondered how the scene would change if I entered into it as well. It had such a dreamy quality to it from where I sat. To step into it would turn it into an actual physical reality for me and so it would not be the same scene at all. Still I thought it would be a nice easy walk and so I left the tractor behind, climbed the steep ledge into the picture of the forest plateau, and began to walk the path my friend had walked. As I lifted my leg, it caught on some thorns. I lifted my other leg and it landed in a pile of branches that cracked and shifted making it hard to get a solid footing. As I continued to walk, I realized it was not a plateau at all, but actually up hill and thick with brush. Not a bad place to be, but also not the picture I had envisioned either. Walking through this area was actually tough work. Not smooth at all. Constantly having to duck below limbs and stopping to find your way around obstacles. My destination was not far, but it took so much more effort to reach it than I would have imagined.

     In that moment I had an interesting thought. If I had just stayed where I was and watched my friend walking from my viewpoint on the tractor and never entered into the scene myself, I would never have known he had expended any effort at all. When he returned, even though he had just had an experience of walking through rough terrain, I would have thought he had just had an effortlessly pleasant walk through the woods. I would therefore have no frame of reference from which to judge his mood when he returned. Even though I watched him, I would have had no idea what he had just been through. It made me realize that no one really knows what it is to be me and I don't really know what it is to be anybody else. Therefore I really have no frame of reference to judge anybody. I realized also, that even though I may have experience doing something that someone else is doing, I still have never done it in their body or from the mental states that their past experiences have created for them. So basically, all I have in life is my own experience. Anything I judge in another is really just an assumption I make based I what I know about myself and it is truly invalid.