Читать книгу The Forging and the Death of a Reflection - Dr. Peter J. Swartz Swartz - Страница 6

“Grab hold of it!

Both hands!

Tighter!”

I was about ten and out with my father on a deep-sea fishing boat.

I had apparently hooked a large cod and was pulling it up with a hand line.

The activity had captured my father’s attention and he was exhorting me.

The pressure in his voice was even more elevated than the customary, tense level.

“Tighter!”

“Use both hands!”

My father was making his points.

My excitement quickly vanished, extinguished by the sense that whatever I was doing, it was not turning out well.

It was a familiar little death.

Though I had no understanding of what was happening in that moment.

And then a split-second later, I hear another voice,

“No, he’s all right.

He’s doing fine.

Yep, just like that with the tips of his fingers.

Nice and easy.

That’s it.”

The boat’s captain had moved over to offer his point of view.

I felt complete surprise hearing my father’s voice orders countermanded.

It was a first; and it was a revelation.

“What? What I was doing was just fine?”

I am shocked.

And simply hearing an accurate reflection of what I was doing—just holding the line lightly with my fingertips in this case—was a recognition that hit me like a tremor. It was a foreign experience, but oddly comforting.

My world expanded in that one moment, for a brief moment.

“It was possible to be noticed, to be seen?

It was possible to be doing something right?”

Revelations can happen in a moment, but absorbing them can take a lifetime.

The void created by the absence of recognition leads to self-blame.

Regrettably, that is the only explanation available to the ten-year-old me.

I can’t see much beyond my own experience.

I can only know the present and surmise that I am at its center.

I do see my own reflection, watching it as it takes shape.

Knots can happen, especially when trying to catch something.

I know that my father will take over and take care of the new knot in the fishing line.

“Give that to me.”

The hand-over happens.

The untangling happens silently in my father’s large hands.

And the hand-back happens also in silence—time after time, scene after scene.

“How is it that I’m not a part of this?”

I wonder silently.

“It’s my line.”

“It’s not even that big of a tangle.”

“I’m happy in a way that the line is freed up, but…

“I’ve learned that thing again.”

“I can’t do it for myself.”

More than that—

I know I can’t do it for myself now with this knot, and likely not later with any subsequent knots that surely will arise.