Two weeks ago today, some friends and I held a celebration of life at the Denver Botanic Gardens for my dear departed Elisa. I waited quite a while to schedule this gathering because Elisa never liked it when other people held such events too close in time to someone's passing. Everyone I've spoken with since then has commented on how beautiful the gathering was; if you ask me, that's because so many beautiful people were there to remember Elisa.
While talking over lunch today with a dear friend of mine who was there, I realized anew that every human being has countless facets. At the celebration I spoke about various aspects of Elisa's life based on our thirty-five years together, and also relayed remembrances provided by friends of hers who weren't able to travel in from the East Coast. A number of folks in the room supplemented these insights with their own perspectives on Elisa as a friend (in some cases for forty or fifty years), work colleague, Pilates buddy, movie buff, neighbor, dog lover, fellow volunteer in causes she cared about, and so on. Indeed, I might even speculate that there are as many facets to a person as there are other people to perceive those facets, because everyone sees different things through their unique relationship with that person.
I, too, have many facets. Some people know me primarily or exclusively as a technologist, philosopher, translator, poet, musician, friend, relative, neighbor, volunteer, etc. Even in each of those realms there are multiple aspects - for instance, some readers might be familiar with my writings about and translations of Epicurus but not my work on Aristotle or Nietzsche, and in my career I might have related to different people as a technical leader, open-source contributor, standards author, manager, business partner, etc. Furthermore, different friends of mine likely see different facets of me depending on where we became friends (e.g., at school vs. at work), how long we've known each other, our respective interests, what we enjoy doing together, the history and depth of our relationship, the social affordances I might happen to provide to a particular person, and the like.
Although this might make it sound as if facets are purely social, it seems to me that everyone has internal facets, too. Yet my sense is that these are harder to perceive and enunciate because most of us are not especially versed in exploring the inner world. Because we lack the necessary concepts and skills, the inner world is too often a kind of terra incognita, like the blank spaces on ancient maps. Inner exploration is something I'd like to get better at in the coming years, so if I come across authors and disciplines that particular helpful in this regard I'll post about them in the future.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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