Earlier today, in a momentous break with recent routine, I set aside time to be with me, Abbie. My aim was to step outside the drumbeat of each-hour-taken-over-by-its-ineluctable-task. I wanted to bracket all the tasks and ask the question: Am I still the girl I used to know?

How is it with me?

I supposed that one way to know how one is would be by asking about one’s relationships. I probably have (taking time to count them) a larger number of friends than I can recall having at earlier journey-points of my life. Just now, they are mainly reachable by phone or zoom, thus not figures with whom I’m likely to cross paths in midstride, where we can stop by common consent for an hour’s heart-to-heart at some nearby café. But, since I have little time for breaks like that in the midst of my working days, the more intense reunions we get at intervals better suit the present phase of my life.

In the time set aside for getting me on the line – I tried experimentally to see myself in the mirror of each friend. I imagined that each relationship must involve a shift in vantage point – a shift that might disclose surface inconsistencies. After all, one speaks differently with different friends. Assuming that any such inconsistencies would be like cracks in a surface, I wanted – peering through the cracks – to get a glimpse of the true depths, however dark, that might lie hidden beneath the surface of me.

But no. As I pictured myself standing beside each friend, that did not happen. Although I could see that each person was encountered at a different angle or vantage point – so that the relationships gave different degrees of prominence to one or another feature of me – I saw no radical inconsistencies between the different angles I showed to different friends. No more than a Greek or Roman statue one walks around at a museum, noticing different sides as one circles it, becomes inconsistent with itself because of these differences. The differences are consistent with the overall unity of the statue. And so it seemed to be with me!

Well, I asked, what about how I am with Jerry, my husband? Doesn’t he get to see depths – the abysses? – that are veiled for others? But apparently not. The chief difference I can recognize, if I try to picture me alongside Jerry, is that there is a more uninhibited current of love. He’s not afraid to take more in. So there’s more available.

Well, what about my relations with God, with the great Unseen? Wouldn’t some feature – creditable or discreditable – come into a higher resolution focus if now I tried to picture me alongside (in the same scene as) the Ultimate? Of course I can’t see God. But I can get some sense or picture of me in my relation to God.

But there’s no hidden feature that I can see. All I find in myself – visualized as part of a twosome with God – is a strong elan toward doing God’s will!

In sum, the abysses I was looking for, the encounter with an inner consciousness resembling some engraving, perhaps by Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) for example, where an alchemist sits at his long table laden with ancient volumes of forgotten lore – back of him a cavernous, shadowy, interior workshop hung with spiders’ webs – wasn’t at all what I discovered when I deliberately set aside this time for introspection.

At the risk of sounding pretty shallow, I must report that the feeling of how -it-is-with-me is remarkably like how it felt to be me when I was just a small girl.

What you see

is what you get!

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