I'm not really a believer in romantic love at first sight. I am, however, a believer in platonic love between friends at first sight. I think you can look at someone (I can anyway) and know almost instantly who my people are. I think back over the past couple years of my life, in which I've made amazing adult friends, and nearly all the situations are the same. I saw them, and some deeply seated tribal instinct was aware that we would be friends. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but the more intimately I know those exceptions, I can't believe I didn't pick up on our shared vibes. The people for whom I care the most, the ones with whom I connect the best, it's like my heart and mind handpicked them for me as I walked along my path, like trees in the forest that I bump into when I'm mountain biking. Except my friends don't rough me up. They believe in me, believe the best things about me, even though they see me at my worst. I believe the best things about them, and believe in them unfalteringly, and really don't even remember when I've seen them at their worst.
Our friends' interpretations of our character, physical and metaphysical, and our own... they're like some sort of cataclysm, two worlds colliding in our heads. What if we saw ourselves how others see us? Especially those who care for us, encourage us, and see within us our great potential?
A small takeaway from multiverse theory is that there are infinite versions of ourselves playing out across other universes, in good ways, in bad ways, any way you can imagine or can't imagine. Endless us. Built from stardust, doing whatever it is we do in other ways. The theory also posits that if, due to uneven expansion of universes, the two branes of the parallel universes brush together, we could meet our other selves.
Here's where I butcher the theory for my use. What if we could snap the branes together and become our better, more confident selves, under our control, smashing the two worlds together. What if we're living in two or three closely threaded parallel universes? What if what is inside our head is our own, and the greatness our friends see is yet another? And sometimes, through pictures, our friends' words, or raw data on our computer screen, we see through our own pathway through the universal fabric to the next universe?
When Scrooge meets with the Ghost of Christmas Future, he struggles as he discovers his own grave site. He sees his name on the headstone, and begins to fall apart at the seams, on seeing through to the other universe that could be.
"'Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,' said Scrooge. 'But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.'" A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
How explosively great could we be if we let down the sheets that block us in, like Scrooge's broken coldness locked out the good, and kept in his old personal self perceptions? Our faltering perceptions of our own abilities are often the very things that hold us back from our goals. Break through, and soak in the wonderful things other believe about you. I'm tired of wishing I could see what others see in me.
My resolution this year is to actively pursue belief in myself and what others have to say well about me. Accept compliments. Absorb encouragement. Drink it like it's the best tea I've ever tasted. Say goodbye to the doubts and replace the why nots with "Why the hell not?!". Our lives are too short and cosmically special to continue to not be the best us, and believe in the best us.
Snap through that space time continuum. Abuse scientific theory (not really, but I had to include this...). Be your best damn self. Take chances, accept invitations to rides where you know you're way outside your ability level, read something new and challenging, learn to make something new, learn to do something exciting and strange. Because you can. Your friends, your window to the other you, already know you can. Just listen to them.
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