133. ...beautiful foibles and minor physical habits...

(morning thinking)

Photo by Vitaliy Grin on Unsplash

I encountered this same Thomas Merton quote twice last week. In fact, I think it came up on consecutive days.

“Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

The “secret beauty of their hearts”. Seeing the secret beauty in a stranger is one of my favourite lived moments. I think I’m fortunate in having a mind that slips out of sync with a situations needs and wanders.

I don’t know if I like the “neuro-divergence as a super power” analogy but my own special brain makeup can be a magical and useful oddity. A flighty mind skips about, lands in more places.

On a bus or in a queue at the post office, my attention idly flitting across the faces of the other people as they come and go, I'll occasionally catch a glimpse of a person's beautiful quirk. The thing they do that causes their partner's heart to skip or that might one day cause a fall into love.

It’s like spotting an unexpected butterfly.

You know the things. You’ll have seen them too. At the very least in the people you love most. It's that odd way she curls hair around her thumb, or the half smile half frown he does as he looks off into the middle distance of his own mind. Or maybe they purposefully turn a bag of crisps upside down before opening it and you can tell from the practiced deftness of their fingers that this is how they always do it. Maybe it’s a banana that gets the upside down treatment or they nibble little cuts into their apple and leave a perfect, neatly sculpted, core.

I’ll see it and it's not particularly meaningful or special to me, just a quirk I’ve observed on another human, but I know with certainty that there's a specific someone out there who’ll go weak at the knees for this one particular, whimsical idiosyncrasy.

Imagine if there was a way of discovering and connecting those two people. The subtlest of dating apps fed by minute, nearly insignificant, micro expressed character signifiers spotted and logged by strangers. Maybe the value is in the rarity of happenstance connection. Maybe we ought not to have an app for that.

In the moments of reflection following these chance observations I’ll always wish I'd kept a record of each one and think how lovely it would be to have a row of worn notebooks on a shelf. Lists of beautiful foibles and minor physical habits that connect a person's idle inner world to the mind of someone who loves them.

January eighth 1996. LRT Bus No.33. (heavy rain)

Woman with thick wooly scarf closes the novel she’s reading and gently tap taps a rhythm onto her lips with the book’s spine while she thinks about what she’s just read.

Maybe.

Chicken scratched pencil notes whose jagged hand belies the motion of the bus or train on which they were made. Or perhaps it’s neat and deliberate coffee shop cursive, thoughtfully drawn out with patience and focus. The notebooks in their ranked uniformity would show a history of having noticed. Evidence of humanity’s delightful and multifaceted mannerisms. I might have Dymo labeled date ranges on the spines.

I keep five years of filed invoices and receipts for HMRC - just in case - that no one will ever see. Every year the oldest one goes into the fire. Boring box files, unseen under a desk on a low shelf, evidence of the least interesting aspects of my transactional life.

There’s no contrasting collection of peculiar logbooks, on a proud eye level shelf, celebrating collated oddities of observed humanity. It's an accountability misalignment problem. My unfulfilled daydreams don't issue fines.

Not obviously so.

I see flashes of beauty and brilliance, I remember some but forget most. Maybe they don’t need, and ought not to be, collected. Like butterflies.

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I suppose these posts are an expression of my own whimsy.

If you love someone who does something that makes your heart quicken and your lips tingle you could share this post with them and include a little note about that weird thing they do.

It might earn you a kiss.