There are fish that live very deep and cannot survive near the top. It is not that they dislike the surface or disapprove of it. Their bodies are built for pressure and darkness, and if one is brought up it does not adapt, it comes apart. Some people are made much the same way. They can come to the surface, they can stay there for a moment or two and be perfectly pleasant and say the expected things. They cannot live there.
And most of life is conducted up there. That is the hardest observation to accept, because it is not a small remark about a few people. Look at almost any ordinary day and see what the talk is about. Arrangements, weather, prices, plans, what somebody said about somebody else. All of it is real and none of it goes below a certain depth, and by unspoken agreement nobody takes it lower.
This is not a criticism of anybody, and that matters, because it can very easily sound like contempt and it is not contempt. It is closer to bewilderment. Almost everyone is capable of far more than the conversations they are having. So why are all of us having those conversations, year after year, with people we have known for decades?
The layers we grow over ourselves
Part of it is that from the time we are small we are taught to keep our true selves underneath something. Not maliciously. It is simply how a child learns to survive a group. You discover which parts of you are welcome and which cause trouble, and you build a covering that presents the welcome parts. It works, and that is exactly the problem, because a thing that works gets kept.
Over the years these coverings stop being something anybody puts on in the morning. They set. They become the shape people are known by, and they answer to that shape without effort, and eventually nobody can easily tell where the covering ends and the person begins. A whole life can pass this way, competently, likeably, with a great many acquaintances and a full calendar, and never once be met by anybody.
The strangest part is that everybody is doing it at the same time. So two people who both long for something deeper sit across a table exchanging the small currency of the surface, each assuming the other prefers it that way, each entirely capable of the other thing. Neither one goes first. This happens constantly, in every town, and it is happening somewhere right now.
Why the surface is not enough
What is actually wrong with the surface? Nothing, taken on its own. The surface is necessary. It is how strangers meet without alarming each other, how a difficult day is got through, how ordinary friendliness is exchanged between people who owe each other nothing. There is no argument at all with the surface. The argument is with living there permanently and calling it a life.
Because here is what happens when we do. The days fill up. We are busy, we are surrounded, we are in demand and often admired. And every night something inside is dissatisfied and cannot name what, because on paper nothing is missing. There is work and people and plans and prospects. What could possibly be wrong? Nothing is wrong. It is only that not one thing which happened today reached the part that was actually waiting.
How much of what anybody said today touched their own heart? Not somebody else's heart, which is a separate question. Their own. Of all the words that left them between morning and night, how many were actually theirs, and how many were the words the situation required?
Going down, and coming back up
Nobody can live entirely in the depth either, and that is worth saying, because there is a kind of person who hears this and concludes that the answer is to withdraw from ordinary life and speak only about serious matters. That is not depth. That is another surface with different vocabulary, and it is lonelier than the first one and considerably more pleased with itself.
What is worth wanting is a life where a person can go down and come back up freely, where the depth is available rather than hidden, where a conversation can turn without either person having to apologise for turning it. That is rare. In a whole life anybody may find two or three people with whom it is genuinely possible, and finding even one should be understood for exactly what it is.
The rest of the time we do what we can. We stay up top, we say the expected things, we are kind, and we carry the other thing quietly. And sometimes, very occasionally, somebody says something slightly truer than the situation required, and the floor drops a little, and there are about four seconds in which to decide whether to follow them down or laugh and change the subject. Almost everybody laughs and changes the subject far more often than they would like to admit. Almost nobody has ever regretted the times they followed.
