When I was a kid, one of my favourite cartoons was Transformers… and one of my favourite things about transformers was its tagline.. “More Than Meets the Eye”. They were basically robots from outer space camouflaging as ordinary vehicles.... and for some reason that appealed to me a lot. In fact it still does.
I’m a staunch believer of this – that there is almost always more than what meets the eye; both in things and in people. Things are always more to things than what they seem, people are always more than who you think they are; life’s never merely what you see on the surface. There’s always more. It’s a truth I have slowly but surely come to discover and appreciate.
Why has the phrase ‘more than meets the eye’ stuck with me since those childhood days? Maybe it has to do with the value I place on the importance of depth.
Maybe it’s just me behaving like a geek, but I do believe that anything / anyone that is worth knowing is worth knowing well. Any subject, any issue, any field, any friendship, any relationship, anything worth your time knowing, is worth knowing well.
People sometimes wonder why I ask so many questions sometimes, or why I seem to be interested in knowing all sorts of intricate details about people / things. I never really thought much about it until they asked, because asking, learning and getting to know things / people in a more intimate manner comes quite naturally to me.
I think it’s this; I cannot love what I do not know. Or put in another way, I want to know as much as possible about anything / anyone that interest me or that I care about. There is no other way to it. Not that I must know.. just that I would naturally want to know. The knowledge.. the intimate knowledge about that something / someone in turn makes me feel intimate with that person. The level of knowledge you are privy to is direction proportional to your level of intimacy with that person / thing.
For example, when I’m interest in a subject or new topic, I really spend hours upon hours on the internet reading, researching, watching videos, trying to understand, grasp, comprehend and appreciate the thing I’m trying to learn. I immerse myself in that subject.. in an almost obsessed like manner.
And when I’m interest in someone (in the purest sense of the word), I find myself wanting to know anything and everything about the person. Who they are, where they are from, what they are all about, what their quirks are, why they don’t like purple stripes, how they acquired their obsessions with buying bed sheets…..whatever it is that makes them…. THEM.
Does that make sense?
And when I finally feel like I have gone beyond that surface level of things, that I have seen more than what meets the eye, then only do I feel like I at least know something about that someone / something.
The flip side of this is that I realize that it sometimes intrudes on people’s privacy. When it’s me clapping with one hand, I end up crossing lines I shouldn’t by way asking questions I have no business asking, and wanting answers I have no business knowing. I have had to learn to control myself; to not ask too many questions to people I am unsure about else I drive them away even more.
And on the flip side, I often feel like there is so much more to me than what I have allowed people to see. My fiancee’s most constant comment about me is that the ‘me’ that she sees behind closed doors and in our most private moments is so much more than what the outside world sees. She says I’m so private I allow so little people to see the more intimate sides of me. Which I found hard to deny. The things I do are often more deliberate than they seem….because my usually choose to act in more subtle ways that other people. And for me, letting people in too see what’s inside is as deliberate as keeping the others out.
Or maybe I’m just acting out my childhood fantasy of being a Transformer.. Disguised as one thing on the outside, but truly another on the inside….. moving around everything holding a secret that there is more to me that what meets the eye.
Autobots assemble!
:-P
Cheers
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