I love the way little children speak to strangers. There’s a familiarity already woven into the conversation— children will start a story in the middle, assuming you know the rest. They will give names and dates and emotions of people you’ve never met, and use words like “Mom” and “Daddy” in reference to family you don’t know. It’s always best when I hear children speak to each other for the first time. There’s a transparency that I find so pure in its honesty. Children want to know and be known. So do I.

So do you, I believe.

So, why doesn’t this unabashed curiosity exist in adult spaces? I think it’s because we’ve been taught to stay on the path of familiarity and routine. Life has also taught most adults to find and seek out security— whether that be in a person or something wholly different. To seek out newness, to be curious in any way, to acknowledge more than what is known, is to deviate from the schema we’ve created.

I believe this schema has also made us isolated, divided, and created a society of misunderstood bobbleheads speaking and gesturing with words and symbols that no one else can decipher. We are all just trying to express ourselves in a world where context is everything, because no one person has lived the same life. In a utopia, this mode of thinking might’ve made everyone more open to expressing themselves freely, so that everyone’s attempts at interpretation could be shared. Alas, patriarchy and imperialism has made this a world of recluses, fighting off intimacy through understanding one hot-button topic at a time.

Imagine trying to express the ideas and worldly understanding of your inverse. I’ll use the topic of marriage. Some think it’s the Right Way to Love, and although I disagree, I want to use this as a thought experiment to challenge my own believes and to hopefully acknowledge another’s with the expectation of becoming a bit more empathetic.

“I am out with lanterns looking for myself.”

Emily Dickinson

The ceremonial bond between a lovers has, throughout history, been seen as common and institutionalized for nearly 5,000 years. Although it hasn’t always been instated for love, its existence in modern society is not some new-aged understanding our grandparents created. People have long fastened themselves to one another, for money or property or legitimacy or some other ostentatious fourth thing. Men marry women to be deemed successful, women have historically married men to stay alive. Though marriage as an institution has been around much longer than the modern Bible, people also use that as means to legitimize the act of marriage. And I am from the US, so that book is very important to the fabric of the nation.

As a woman, I am supposed to strive for marriage because it is a social, cultural, and financial means of proving my value. Marriage generally means I have settled down with someone I love, I am sharing my resources, and I am provided the status symbol of Wife. If I were to put myself in the mind of a religious, Christian woman, this would also mean that I have made it to the second-highest rank of womanhood, right behind Mother.

To acknowledge this kind of ideology towards marriage is to agree that is worthy to exist next to my comparable indifference. I think we should be able to reconcile our own thoughts, without judgement, and place them next to another’s. This is strictly to learn to acknowledge difference, not to create division. We are all different, and that is something that is worth noting.

Like children, we can blindly speak, accept, and learn from one another without judgement or pretense. There will be enough of that once we reach the inquiry phase in our life journeys. I’ll write about that one of these days.

To acknowledge Nature is to notice the seasons changing, to walk in the rain.

To acknowledge time is to notice aging, to observe it happening in real time.

To acknowledge each other is to notice different with radical curiosity, separate from our own worldviews.

To acknowledge is to learn intimacy and be misunderstood, over and over again.

We can speak mutually, blindly and without reserve, in order to learn. We should aim for curiosity because it is inherently unbiased and faultless. It’s finding a rhythm in the murky sludge of acceptance. To acknowledge means to voice boundaries, and even if they’re not followed at first, we now know we can speak to our own limits.

To acknowledge is to build confidence in your own ability to understand the world around you. I acknowledge that I don’t understand everything, and so I’m always curious to learn more. The dumbest and most ignorant of the human race are those that do not acknowledge or even feign curiosity. Their beliefs are not only their own law, but their believes should be followed by others, even strangers. This is the opposite of curiosity— indifference.

So again I say: I acknowledge you, dear reader. I do not know you, but I see you. I understand that we hold differences, but I am not indifferent. I want to always learn more about the world we inhabit and hopefully more about you in the process.

“I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.”

Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

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