Invisible: Part II

I used to walk down the same street every day. I remember the feeling of anticipation as I would approach one particular house. Every time I would walk past the yard there was a small dog who would follow me the entire length of the fence, barking and jumping.

Once he reached the end of the yard and could go no further as I trundled on down the sidewalk, he would dutifully stand by the fence and bark continuously at my retreating figure.

For months, this was my favourite part of the day.

For those brief moments, I was the sole focus of that dog's attention. Nothing else mattered as much as I did just then. For the thirty seconds or so it took me to pass through the little dog's world, I was certain that I existed.

If this strikes you as somewhat sad, you are probably not wrong, but the sadder truth is perhaps that my own existence was the only one that concerned me. Thinking myself invisible, I never really opened my eyes to see anyone else.

Which superpower would you choose, invisibility or flight?

Jon Ronson, a journalist and radio presenter in the UK, borrows this question from the American author John Hodgman (better known as the PC in the "Mac vs PC" commercials) in his BBC series "Jon Ronson On..."

The "correct" answer, he tells us, is flight. "People who choose flight have nothing to hide," he says somewhat tongue in cheek, "They are selfless, competent and unashamed. People who choose invisibility are deceitful, voyeuristic, fearful crouching perverts."

He then admits, "I would choose invisibility. When I was a child I would have chosen flight. What happened to me?"

Invisibility. In my last post I talked about the invisible people all around us. This time the question is - what if I am the invisible one?

How many times have we simply wanted to be anonymous, get through our day, get home and tune out? How often do we simply want to shut out all the pleas we hear in a day, whether for help or money or political support or moral outrage?

We are not shallow people. We feel deeply, we love deeply, we think deeply. But for the drunk who talks to us on the bus, for the difficult person at work who cannot leave personal problems at home, for the two guys in suits handing out religious tracts on the street - well, invisibility might be nice. Sometimes, God knows, we simply can't take any more.

Invisibility, essentially, is a lack of connection. By choosing to be invisible, we choose not to connect. We may be very deep people but we choose, sometimes for brief moments and sometimes for weeks or months at a time, not to live out of those depths. We have our reasons and they are likely even good ones.

"I realized why I craved invisibility," Jon Ronson tells us. "I wish it was something upbeat and redemptive, but the older we get the more self-consciousness and unsureness hunches us, and my shoulders are really very hunched."

His conclusion: "Invisibility is a comfort, because if the world realized how helpless we are, we're in trouble."

When Hodgman himself was asked if he would opt for flight or invisibility he responded "The correct answer is invisibility. Flight is nice, but we live in the real world."

For good reasons, for reasons no one would blame us for, we close ourselves off. We walk through the world and our thoughts of others are largely hopes that they will not notice us. We live in our depths but not out of them.

Frederick Buechner says that "To bury your life is to have it wither in the ground and diminish. It is to be deeply alone. It is to be less alive than you were to start with." In sharing our lives, in being open about who we are and our hurts, he says "There is no guarantee that we will find a pearl in the depths, that our pain will have a happy end, or even any end at all, but at least we stand a chance of finding in those depths who we most deeply and humanly are and who others are. At least we stand a chance of finding that we needn't live alone in our pain..."

It is not hard to be invisible, the challenge for many of us is quite the opposite. We sit and wait for someone to finally see us but I think the answer is far simpler - I believe that if we truly wish to step out from behind our cloak of invisibility all we need to do is open our own eyes.