What do you really know about anyone but yourself? Probably not nearly as much as you think.....

I sometimes wonder at the complacency that we have in thinking we know what is going on it anyone else's mind.  We become so sure that we know anything about anything going on in any mind besides our own. I know we all do it but what do we really know.  I have been a mother for 31 years and helped raise babies from the time I was a very small child.  Yes, older siblings are pseudo moms long before they are real mom's in large families, not sure about small families I have never lived in one, no being in a two child family until you are 22 months doesn't count, if you have no memory of an event it can't be imparted upon you as experiencing in it.  Okay I digress.  Anyway.  I have said before I am a people watcher probably the results of watching so many sibling along the way it just became second nature to be aware of the doing of those in your view, I was always "responsible" to be watching someone even if I didn't know it was my responsibility so I guess I just do it because.... 

I do like to contemplate other people and their antic,  though it is a fine line between watching and gossiping about what you see, a lesson that has taken me a life time to become proficient at, those who knew me when would be surprised at the changes age has allowed me to make; but you wouldn't believe how many people still think of me as the person I once was and not the sum of the lessons I have learned.  I think that is how we all are seen really.  I am guilty of see children as the same as I last saw them or as the first time I ever saw them, maybe we are all like that and our memory becomes our reality and people live there in the space in our minds forever....hmmm.  Anyway, we are not the person we ever were even a minute later, and no one we know is either, it is just hard not to stamp a person with a label and never allow for the ever-changing aspects of life in ourselves or anyone else.  We never truly understand this of ourselves or others and maybe that is where my question begins. 

What do we really know about anyone but ourselves?  Most definitely not as much as we assume.  I think I know my Poppie but he does surprise me once in awhile.  I assume that most people know their spouses in the same way but am surprised to find that that is not always the case.  It is true that we have spent probably more time continuously in each others company, in the last 34 years, than most spouses, but I really rarely think of it in that light or maybe I didn't know all didn't.  I assume that spending all, or nearly all your time with some one is the norm in a marriage but it is not necessarily so.  I think in all those years we have only spent less than 30 nights apart, and that counts all of the schooling did to be a dispatcher.  In the last eight we don't either one have an outside of home job so we don't ever spend time apart in our daily lives now, so the bottom line is we spend our lives, and have most our marriage and courtship, in each others pockets.  NO, it is not for everyone, but then it took me along time to know that about others.  Poppie is not a boys night out, or a boys weekend away sort of guy, and for the most part I am not either, though I am a little more social than he is.  All this babbling brings me back to the point, I know pretty well all there is to know about my spouse, but do I really?  Does he just share with me only what he is comfortable with, does he have secrets in his soul that he does not share?  No, I am not talking about a physically secret existence but I am talking about the person he is in his soul, in his darkest dreams and in his locked up inner most being.  I do know that he has that in him because once in awhile, a little more of that being lets me in. 

I am a pretty open person asked me anything and I am apt to tell you almost anything you asked me about, probably in a more open and direct manner than you wanted and more than you ever dreamed of knowing, so people who know me learn not to ask.... lol.  I wonder sometime if there is a me I am still learning about that is as unknown to me as the inner being that I am still getting to know that lives in Poppie?  I do know that I know less about almost every being on earth than I know about Poppie.  I make assumptions that I know my kids, my siblings, my friends but am shocked in moments of candor to find I don't know them at all.  I know that I only know the person they want me to know.  Well my little Ladies, I still know mostly about them but daily they become the inner private beings that we all are, the inner being we battle and toil with our whole lives.  Is that inner person our soul?  Is that the part that is God's?  The part that no one touches but him?  I think maybe it is.  I think that that is the us that goes to heaven and is never touched by anyone in our lives.  The part that is 'the until death do we part' in our wedding vows... I think maybe it is one of the mysteries of God and he wants it to be his knowing alone ........ tomorrow.