Brilliant

Do you ever think about how so naturally self-interested we are and the ways in which we try to curb that? We try to look beyond ourselves, but still when a photo is taken our face is the first one we look for, and when an opinion is offered our perspective is the first side we’ll take, and we can’t break it the way we all sit around navel gazing, obsess over the holes of our own bodies, pick at the pores. We learn to pretend to listen to others with interest when really we are only listening so that the speaker will in turn hear our speech too. We try not to talk over each other. But why do we continue to allow for the possibility that our speech is not interesting? Why wouldn’t our faces be the most interesting among the sea of other faces in the photo? Why wouldn’t you memorize your every pore even as you have been taught that it is more virtuous to turn your attentions to the sound of shrapnel bursting off bombs distantly in someone else’s background. We are childlike in our endless wonder at ourselves. But wouldn’t it be naïve to believe that our most basic pieces are not interesting, set against the backdrop of the only experience we really have access to—our own interior life rich in the confluence of sensation and emotion and remembered history. Of course we are interesting in our private context. Our speech is fucking brilliant. It is brilliant when our face shows in a photograph. Our navels are brilliant. Not in content, for the most part, but for the fact that such a vividly firsthand experience as the act of living has managed even to happen at all.