Meeting Ourselves

It's curious that we spend so much of our lives trying to know ourselves. We notice our thoughts. We reflect on our feelings. We try to understand why we do what we do. Yet there is something we can never observe. We can know what it feels like to be ourselves, but we can never know what it feels like to meet ourselves.

You can hear your own voice, but never as someone else hears it. You can see your own face, but never as another sees it while you're laughing. You can know your intentions, but never know what your presence feels like. There is an entire dimension of ourselves that exists beyond the reach of our own awareness. Not because it is hidden, but because it can only ever be experienced from somewhere else.

Perhaps this is why another person's reflection can feel so unexpectedly profound. Not because they have discovered something new, but because they have momentarily revealed a part of ourselves that we could never have encountered alone.

Perhaps part of who we are exists only in our own experience, and another part exists only in the experience of others. Neither holds the whole of us.

Perhaps we spend our lives trying to know ourselves through the only perspective incapable of seeing us whole.