Dear Reader,
We are all inhabitants of private universes. One person’s world revolves around the crack of a bat against a baseball, the geometry of a perfect swing, the smell of grass and dirt in late afternoon light.
Another lives in the rustle of fabric, the hunt for the perfect fit, the small thrill of finding something beautiful at exactly the right price. Someone else exists in the glow of a movie screen, lost in stories that feel more real than their own life, while their neighbor obsesses over chess moves, calculating combinations three steps ahead, maybe four.
These worlds are complete unto themselves. They have their own languages, their own sources of joy and frustration, their own measures of success and failure. The teenager checking batting averages speaks a different dialect than the one scrolling through college applications, and both are foreign to the person planning their next chess gambit.
Every now and then, these separate worlds collide. We attempt communication across the vast distances between our experiences. We try to explain why this particular movie matters, why that chess position is beautiful, why the sound of a well-hit ball carries such poetry. We gesture toward our private enthusiasms and hope someone else will understand. But here’s what we’ve all noticed, even if we don’t always say it out loud: hardly anyone ever really listens. We’ve become a species of people waiting for our turn to talk. We nod politely while someone explains their passion, but we’re already preparing our own response, our own story, our own version of what matters. The conversation becomes two monologues running parallel to each other, never quite intersecting.
This isn’t cruelty or even indifference. It’s something more fundamental about the human condition. We are each trapped inside our own experience, looking out at a world that makes sense to us in ways that are difficult to translate. The chess player sees elegance in what looks like tedium to others. The movie lover finds profound meaning in what seems like entertainment. The baseball fan experiences something approaching the sacred in what appears to be just a game.
Yet occasionally, something breaks through. Someone not only listens but hears. They lean in, ask the right question, make the connection that shows they’ve understood not just your words but the feeling behind them. These moments stand out precisely because they’re rare. When they happen, the distance between worlds suddenly collapses. For a brief time, you’re not alone in your private universe.
Maybe this is enough. Maybe the fact that connection is difficult makes it more precious when it occurs. Maybe the challenge isn’t to escape our individual worlds but to become better at building bridges between them, to develop the patience and curiosity necessary to step into someone else’s experience, even briefly.
Because in the end, we’re all doing the same thing. We’re all trying to make sense of being alive, finding meaning in whatever captures our attention and passion. The specific obsession may vary, but the underlying human need to care deeply about something, to find purpose in pursuit, remains constant across all our separate worlds.
The question isn’t whether we live in isolation—we do. The question is what we do with those moments when the isolation breaks, when we actually see each other clearly across the distance. Those moments, brief as they are, might be where real life happens.
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