perspectiveness

"A rock piles ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral." -A. de Saint Exupery

In high school, I struck up an unlikely friendship. It was one of those friendships that made absolutely no sense. He was a he and I was a she. He was a athlete and I was kind of a nerd. He was most definitely a "player" and I was most definitely not. And to be honest, he was jerk (actually I have another word for it, but jerk is what I've decided to go with here on a public forum) and obviously, I'm not a jerk (at least for the most part). We had nothing in common and in fact, I shouldn't have been his friend. He wasn't very nice. He was never mean to me, but I consistently wanted to punch him for the way he treated most everyone else. I mean there were good qualities- he had a sense of humor and actually he could be quite charming, but you rarely saw this part of him.

But for some reason, I maintained the friendship. And we stayed friends through college. Not great friends, but the kind of friends who would occasionally call and hang out all night sporadically. He would need help on homework and I would help. I would be moving furniture and he would bring his truck. I wouldn't let him tell me about his social life, because I'm pretty sure I would disapproved of everything. And he still was a jerk, and now often a jerk even to me.

My roommates often asked me why I held onto this friendship. What made me stick with him even when he gave me every reason to write him off?

And all I could think was that despite the jerkiness, despite the poor choices, and despite everything else, I truly believed that he had the potential to be an absolutely amazing individual. That on those rare occasions that he let his guard down and was kind and compassionate, I would get glimpses of the person he was capable of being. And so I whenever I looked at him, I looked past the way he acted. I looked past the face value evidence of who he was, and tried to always see the potential he had. To always see the person he could choose to be.

I wish that this story had a happy ending. I wish that I could say that he has mellowed and chosen wiser, but that's not what happened. I wish I didn't have to say that eventually he was too mean and too hurtful and we parted ways.

But despite all that, I still see within in the person he could. When I look at him, there is no anger. There is just a deep sense of sadness. He's just choosing to be a rock pile, when within him dwells a cathedral.

And I think, to an extent, we all do this. Either we refuse to see what we really are or we refuse to see what other people are. We look at ourselves and others and we don't see anything of value. We see what's there. We see the pieces of rubble and stone of their lives. We don't stop and look deeper. We don't stop and ponder what these pieces of stone are building. We see only who the person is in that moment, and don't stop to try to see who they will become. We choose not to have hope that someday that pile of stone can become a cathedral.

Of course, every rock pile won't become a cathedral. People are always going to dissapoint, let us down, and hurt us. But I firmly believe that to see the potential, to see the cathedral within someone, and to see them remain a rock pile is still infinitely better than just seeing someone as a worthless pile of stone- unchanging and of little worth. I think it takes far more courage to hope and be dissapointed than to never hope at all. It takes more vision to see what could be possible, than to settle for what is probable.