How Many Times Can We Have a First Date?

You’re nervous and uncertain, ignorant of the facts, with details sparse. You’ve filled in the gaps with your presuppositions and imagination. You’ve prepared and prepared, bettered yourself and your understanding of how this should go at every opportunity, considered all the ways this could go wrong, examined every angle, and even made room for a few methods of escape. You think maybe you should postpone or reschedule, defer to another day.

How many times can we have a first date? Only once, of course. So it’s a fairly preloaded occurrence, charged with opportunity, emotion, and an energy of anticipation, curiosity, and mystery you didn’t know you had any interest in until just now.

But once you’ve met up and taken a seat, after a few minutes of easy banter and checking off the trivial and trite, if the moment is right and the players are aligned, perhaps fated or destined, a magic unfolds.

I’d liken this to any significant moment of discovery, any milestone of personal revelation and the resonant unveiling of another aspect of the great mystery of this one short life.

When we’re young, everything is new. We’re open, endlessly curious, fully malleable, transforming and morphing as we formulate our central hypothesis, develop a theory, and then embark on the grand practical experiment of narrative and identity, both drastically variable from one minute to the next, even under the strictest of conditions. It’s inevitable that, amid the many good and useful, practicable and resilient concepts that serve us, we’ll take on many incomplete, inept, inaccurate, and incompatible ideas, along with a good dose of epistemic or ontological ambiguity.

As we get older, we go into every situation pretending to know, to have gleaned some wisdom, to impart what we think we’ve earned and paid our dues for, only to be reminded again and again how premature those presuppositions, presumptions, and assumptions were.

The surface is temporary, fragile, uncontrollable, and that unsettles us. Appearances direct and misdirect, capture and coerce. Underneath is a different matter. Every so often we remember. The searching, seeking, asking, and demanding suddenly become amusing, even moot. Absent the conditions that sustain the many roles we adopt and adapt to, the infinite, the absolute, the untouchable reasserts itself in the silence.

Life keeps throwing us into situations, sometimes surprising us pleasantly, terrifically, terrifyingly, and, in what is hopefully the rarest of moments, with sheer horror. We’re reminded not only of the transience of this experience but also of its inherent gifts. We’re humbled, humiliated, lifted up and inspired, shaken, stirred, disrupted and disturbed.

But there’s always a through line. Something that echoes all the way back to the beginning, even back into our mother’s womb, and quite possibly before even that.

Why are we here?

To be. To do. To strive, connect, imagine, empathize, comprehend, explore, and express. To multiply, survive, and, if we’re timely and purposeful, committed and courageous, to thrive.

This whole life story you’re living could simply be a first date. Every moment is a fresh question, an opportunity for novelty and reward, a chance at something deeper, more profound, or its complete opposite, even its undoing.

How remarkable.

Once again, you’re nervous and uncertain, ignorant of the facts, with details sparse. You’ve filled in the gaps with your presuppositions and imagination. But you are here, at the table. Dinner’s served.

Nosce te ipsum