Our House


Dear Eugene,

I certainly didn't expect to watch Daniel Day Lewis' final movie (I hope he is wrong about his retirement decision) last night and find out it is about exactly what I wrote yesterday morning.

What does it take to break down a man so that he could break through his little Self?

All our life we've been taught to think for ourselves, to build a house that would welcome our favorite memory, people, and things, and shut off unwelcome guests, suffering past, present, and future.  Why would we then now want to do things any differently?

Why do we want a "breakthrough" when things have been working well so far, that after all these years we seemed to have "found ourselves" in our little house-building project, a place we could finally call "our own"?  At last we have wrapped our head around ideas to juggle demands big and small, figured out a way to reduce people and stuffs to manageable size and trivialize or even trash those we deem negligible.  Our house looks clean, impeccable; our social media posts adorned with suggestions explicit and subtle that we are mighty fine exactly the way we are.

So why change now?

Maybe it's because we've been lying and we know that.  Maybe our house is a shithole and stinks to high heaven and we invite only guests who couldn't or wouldn't tell the difference.  Maybe we know having traveled to different ends of the world but not caring about or even knowing our next door neighbor is after all a pretty pathetic and telling irony.  Maybe in the dead silence of night we allow ourselves to take a little peek out our picture window and see the world out there is actually quite beautiful but we know by next morning we won't find a reason good enough to go out there and play.  Maybe we think we know everything there is to know about our spouse our kids our friends our job our country our religion our gods but actually we know absolutely nothing about anything and we know that too because they are all shut behind bedroom doors and we were the one building the rooms and closing the doors exactly the way we willed.

Exactly the way we willed.  Maybe.

Yours, Alex

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