Collective Trauma: The Fallout 25

Interesting. What does that word suggest. What images, sensations and impressions does the word interesting conjure up for us? I have friends who say they find me interesting. Why, I do not know. I don't think of myself as being a very interesting person. This isn't false modesty. I am simply the one who lives with me the most, who puts up with me the most and who knows me a little bit better than anyone else, except perhaps, for god. I don't find myself interesting. Not boring, either. Just that usual very human mix of hubris and self-loathing and happiness and misery and boredom and intrigue and selfishness and altruism. I could go on but I want to keep this interesting. It was a bit of a surprise when I first found that others could find me interesting. I think, having dedicated so much of my life and heart and soul and everything else into God's service, being interesting really took the back seat (or maybe it just got stuffed into the trunk) to other concerns. If I was serving God, then humility would always be a key word in my life. So, how could I possibly live humbly and still be interesting. But living humbly can appear very interesting to others. Look at Mother Teresa. Or Jean Vanier. Or Henri Nouwen. All people who became famous for having poured out their lives in the service of God in the poor and most vulnerable. and I suppose that people find this interesting. I suppose it could be fairly stated that we all want to be engaged somehow, and that in order to become engaged we have to first find something or someone interesting. But really, doesn't this have anything to do with choice and perception? And with what we are particularly needing at the time? When I was in fulltime ministry with the Community of the Transfiguration back in the late eighties and early nineties, we didn't have time to be interesting. we were too busy serving, or trying to serve, when we weren't fighting and bickering among ourselves about how to do it right. I should also add that during that time in my life I was still connected to my family, and they did not find me interesting. Indeed, my whole identity with my family seemed to hinge on my sense of inferiority in the sibling hierarchy. I was not neither loved nor liked by anyone except perhaps for my mother. To the others, I was an inconvenient nonentity. They certainly did not find me interesting, and like many survivors of childhood abuse, I certainly didn't think in terms of being interesting. I thought in terms of survival. So, bearing that in mind, I was also in the middle of God's service. That could be interesting to some, I suppose, but when you are living a life of sacred self-abasement, being interesting is not going to bring you any closer to God and is very likely to alienate us for the inherent narcissism and egoism involved in being, or in making ourselves or in wanting or perceiving ourselves to be...interesting. this dynamic changed after my mother's death. I went to Europe, and spent a lot of time in London. There I was hanging out in the café section of a fashion co-op in the tony Kensington district. I would sit in this converted rail car in the back, breakfasting on my baguette stuffed with brie and savouring my cappuccino while poring over the Times of London or the Observer, then to apply myself to journal and letter-writing, all the while taking in this fascinating panoply of people young, and no longer quite young working and shopping and schmoozing around me. Then lightning struck. This incredibly intriguing woman who sold bondage and fetish garments and lingerie, who had done street mime on the streets of Paris for ten years, told me that she found me interesting. I was dumbstruck. Me? Little old ordinary Canadian me, straight from the colonies, me? Interesting? Honey, surely you must be drunk. Or smoking something that's illegal, or should be. The owner of the café soon befriended me. An American in his sixties, I think a retired drag queen. Hilarious, witty and incisive and he found me interesting. WTF! As did others. All this time, we had been projecting back and forth and back again. Now, to this day, I really don't believe that I or the others are really that interesting, outside of other persons or other species. Perhaps it is the simple fact that we are human that makes us interesting, and we often don't know this. It could be that we are still such empty voids, ourselves, that we try to find in others the beauty that already exists within, and this is also part of our shattered legacy as the very human victims of our Collective Trauma. For me, I am no longer interested in interesting people. They are every bit as lost and dazed and confused as I am and at the end of the day their shit stinks just as bad as yours or mine Gentle Reader. Instead of interesting, give me people who are kind, honest, sincere, generous and open-minded. Now folks like that, I would find very interesting indeed.