Chink in the armour

I was on a late train journey to pick up a friend from the airport recently. The time of night where you are conscious of travelling alone, and the majority of the train was filled with slightly intoxicated revellers returning home to sleep off their work drinks, or continue the party into the early hours. A young french passenger signalled my attention from behind me. ”Is this Amsterdam?” Assuming he meant the airport, I informed him the airport was the next stop and the estimated time of arrival. This satisfied him for all of 4 minutes, after which he beckoned my attention again.

“Are you happy?”

I was confused to say the least, and wondered if I had misheard him. I was so thrown and bewildered by this fairly intimate question from a complete stranger, that I hesitated. He indicated to the pitch black landscape outside the window with a sweep of his hand and said “is this normal?”. To these two rather unexpected philosophical questions I found all I could do was nod my head, still completely caught off guard, and mutter yes, mustering as much positive body language as I could in the hope he would also understand I was fine, and praying he would not ask me again about happiness and what constitutes normality. He didn’t say any more for the rest of the journey, but I was still left with a puzzled feeling about the whole encounter. I had not justified his questions with anywhere near an appropriate answer, but then why should I have engaged with this utter stranger at all, at that time of the night, and alone? It was an inherently sensible move to have made, and yet I still feel as though I had missed a valuable encounter of some kind, through the simple fact that I had shut out any interaction from the onset.

And is this surprising, given that in today’s world, we are bombarded every day, often before we have even opened the door. We are assaulted, not just with a constant stream of adverts, marketing, news and opinions, but with expectations, promises and judgements on how the world is today and how we are meant to perform within it. With such an overload of information trying to dictate and determine how we feel and respond, it’s no wonder that we have developed coping mechanisms.

These mechanisms are our protection, layers to prevent us feeling gullible, cheated, foolish and overwhelmed, they are shields of neutrality which we have in many ways already built into our daily lives. We sometimes refer to this mechanism as desensitisation, to the media, to the poverty we see on our doorstep and injustices committed abroad. In an age where we have more choices and permutations than ever before, this filtering and condensing of information spills over into more than the selection process we go through at the supermarket. We have learnt from a young age to pick our battles, because we come to understand we cannot conquer them all. As we choose the fights we will fight, the truth we will accept and the sacrifices we are prepared to make, we have already locked away a wealth of other causes, filtered out endless other versions of truth, and justified our deeds and actions in the face of it all. It is how we survive each day without drowning underneath the information overload.

I see our defenses up like this in us every day, including in myself, and in essence there is nothing amiss in a ‘thicker skin’ to take on the workings of the world. What concerns me is that our ‘survival response’ has become so innate in our behaviour, that we have created multiple layers so tough that we are left with a certain imperviousness. I wonder if the balance has tipped over all too often to a jaded indifference, I worry we have lost the art of vulnerability in its stead.

In the news today there are distressing stories of heartlessness. Of teenagers laughing while watching a man drowning, and filming the whole scene; people unconcernedly stepping over a collapsed man to get money out of the ATM machine; and one story from a few years ago of a man who tragically failed to stop after spotting a toddler on the road, not wanting to be suspected of abducting the child. These are extreme and tragic examples, which in themselves bring up innumerable issues on the state of society, but are also, at heart, linked to the extent desensitisation can numb our humanity.

I am not saying that we should all engage with strange men on trains as to the meaning of happiness, but that we should not build our defences so strong that we are unaware of those moments which may unexpectedly impact on our lives.

To be moved, to feel connected, often requires a certain degree of vulnerability, letting go of a certain amount of control, letting in a small amount of fear in the unknown. I was made aware of my own defenses in this unusual encounter, of the imperviousness of the armour I have built. I was also made aware of the blemishes and bruises, scratches and scrapes just visible on the surface. Evidence of other less succesful happenstances desparately trying to break through my barriers. And among these are a few deeper cuts, chinks within the armour which have allowed moments such as this to effect me unexpectedly. A signal to me that vulnerability is not all lost, and that thankfully, light can still break through.

“The wound is where the light shines through
The wound is where the light finds you
The wound is where the light shines through
The wound is where the light finds you.”

 Rx