Looking For Alice – Learning Made Hard

We're all individual characters in this story, and words can hardly do justice to the ideas being expressed. This is a good reason to be better with words, and it tells us to accept some limitations, maybe.

I'm digging this guy. I figure it's worth a share here. I look forward to Alice.

Alice has that thing that poems are written about because there are not sufficient words to describe the feeling and we resort to poetry and long-winded letters of attempts at description, but for all the words ever written on the subject, we still find new ways to describe that connection between two people. And even with the myriad descriptions, the core remains the same, that indescribable joy and ease when being open in the depth of soul as two people may find themselves enraptured.

Opening the mind... A person cannot be contained in my ideas about them. They grow and change over time, they should not be expected to act in conformity with ideas of them or with past behavior. That expectation would attempt to contain an ever-evolving being. Random thoughts and quotes from others interpreted, or not. The Swedish guy is quite good,

He treated her as something that could fit in his head, but she couldn't fit in his head, nor he in hers. That was the exciting thing about it. You can only ever know someone when you meet them in open dialog, treating them as unfinished, as capable of surprise. Love is being invested in the continual expansion. Two people who keep diverging but keep finding their way back to each other over and over. When he became something she didn't expect, there was more material to uncover, the relationship could go deeper and conversations richer. They are becoming more of themselves with each other.

We spoke each other into being. Not two finished people who found their match, but two unfinished people who keep making each other through conversation, through crisis, through the thousand small moments of being witnessed into who they are now. Trying to find someone you can become yourself with. I am open to receiving. Just waiting for both people to stop running from the best thing that ever found them. A bunch of randomness here. These days are for moving inward.

A good line here goes something like, I didn't want her as my girlfriend, I wanted her as a human being. That sentiment sounds like a familiar feeling. The man is describing the love he has for Johanna, and he is using Alice as the catalyst and the character discovery mechanism of Dostoevsky as the example. We discover in a continuous fashion because each new scenario presents new circumstances with new knowledge and new skills that can be applied to resolving the current situation, and we learn from there to apply that in the future, ever growing, ever evolving. Looking through this perspective, a person can never be fully known. The quest continues, and after 10,000 hours of conversation, it feels like there's so much more to talk about. We unfold in directions that neither one of us predicted.

In reading the articles and taking ideas from other sources, a theme emerges. The theme could be intention and reflection. We need a plan, and to evolve that plan in a looping pattern of improvement together. Or something like that was presented. Sounded good when I read it. It's the practice that is the convincing element.