Tip of the Iceberg

After reading The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, I was struck (like by a two-by-four in the head) by the discrepancy between how much the mothers and daughters in the novel thought they “knew” about each other, their lives, experiences, and motives compared to how little they actually did.

I started to wonder what I really “know.” I think we can “know” ourselves, but can we ever really “know” someone else?

We come to know ourselves through concerted effort and mountains of awareness and soul-searching. To get there we explore a chamber of our hearts rarely visited, our “feeling memories,” where the essence of “who we are” the real us lives, no edits, no omissions, no retouches.

To truly “know” another person would require accessing that place in them, and I doubt that is possible. What we end up “knowing” about another person is what we see with our eyes and interpret or what we are told. Even when the other person themselves does the telling, the picture is never complete, it comes in snippets, threads that we weave together to form our picture of them.

Next time I think that I “know” something, especially if on the surface it looks “black and white.” I will open my heart and remember that the colors are there, just beyond my view, and remind myself that what I'm seeing may just be the “tip of the iceberg.”