I am large, I contain multitudes

51

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,

And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?

Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,

(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?

Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, 1892

Please spend a little time with that poem, if you can. 

A few days ago, my son asked me a question that has been rolling around my head ever since. It was the kind of question that makes me remember that my son is a whole other person outside of me, and he has thoughts and feelings and hopes that have nothing to do with me whatsoever, no matter how many of my thoughts, feelings and hopes have to do with him. It also made my brain explode a little, and I wished I had a good answer for him in the moment. I did not. 

He asked me, like this, “You know how there are moments in life that change the rest of your life afterwards? Like you’re living, and then something happens, and everything is different afterward?” And I said, yes I did know what he meant, and I spouted off a couple of life-changing moments, like meeting his dad, getting injured in high school, stuff he knew about already, but I was trying to think of something different because he seemed to have something specific in mind. 

Afterwards, several days later, I remembered this poem. And since I couldn’t have this cool conversation with my awesome kid, I’ll have it with you. Now, I don’t know if this poem changed my life the very first time I read it, sometime in college. Maybe the 15th or 30th time is when it hit home, but that little parenthetical, “(I am large, I contain multitudes)” has upended me more than once. 

At first, it was just about me, as most things are in one’s late teens and early 20s. I was impressed that I could see depth in myself, that I could see the layering of my experience and watch it turn into personality. How cool. Look how interesting I am, World. I’m carrying around all of this with me all the time. Don’t you want to know me? 

No, usually the answer was no. Because the next step of discovery was that EVERYONE contains their own multitudes, and everyone wants to be known. And not everyone chooses to see this second step. Keeping comparisons to a minimum, I’ll just say that I became less self-centered once I recognized this. It’s hard, you know, to see outside oneself. The more multitudinous, the more varied and deep and painful the experience, maybe the more difficult it is to see the complexity in others.

There are other versions of this saying, like the one that goes something like, “Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” Also true, also a compassionate way to approach a person. I just love how “multitudes” covers all of it, the good and the bad. 

We’re all out here, walking around with galaxies inside us, trying not to bash into one another, and frankly it’s overwhelming to approach every single person we come across this way, with this level of understanding. Each of us has this in common. All of us are brimming with experience and various trauma and stories and opinions, and we are, all of us, terrified to show anyone too much. So we just pretend it’s not there and hope no one asks to see much of it. 

But then we’re also all just looking for connection. We want to unfold our tightly held selves. We want to find safe people with whom we can stretch out and tell our stories. We don’t want to feign cool indifference all of the time. We want people we can tell our weird late-night musings or share a story from middle school that still haunts us. We have these people though, if we’re lucky, like the poet, asking to be shown. They ask how we are and really mean it. But they won’t stand and press. “Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a moment longer.”

Right? Do you have a person in mind? (I hope it’s me. It’s ok if it’s not.) Just imagine knowing the depth of each person you came across. Imagine knowing the life story of the mail carrier, you know, the one who always smiles and waves when she sees you. Picture knowing the internal monologue of the guy with the scary dog who always walks by your house. Or even (yes I know this is the biggest cliche) the person who cut you off in traffic. Being real, the fancier the car, the less empathetic I’m usually willing to be, but can you imagine how knowing their stories might change things. 

Alright, sure, there are some actual garbage people out there. There are probably people with whom knowing their internal cosmos would actually make things worse. For example, imagine someone born into extreme privilege but who lacks any human empathy and only seeks to further enrich himself by taking over a whole government system and then undermines all social programs that help those in need. Just as an example. I would have a hard time accepting that knowing the internal workings of that type of person’s mind would change my feelings about their actions. 

But for regular folks, I choose to believe, have to believe, that compassion is the answer. I have to believe that finding common ground with others is how we resist hardening and ripping ourselves apart. For a mess this large, for a divide this deep, there could never have been an easy solution. To make deep and lasting change, we need to start with the basics.