Existential Growing Pains

Children I find are so deeply in tune with their existential layer that often they can articulate an existential dynamic within themselves effortlessly.

The following is a follow-up of the post on Existential Hatred. See there.

Was staying at a family recently for shabbos. At some point during, one of the daughters (probably around 6 or 7 years old I'd say) was taking a liking to me and initiated holding my hand or sitting on my lap. I neither encouraged nor discouraged the behavior (although admittedly it was nice to feel some closeness to someone after such long times of being alone).

In any event, it was a matter of time before she came and jumped on my lap in front of her mother. Her mother quickly intervened gently in the affair and told her daughter in a very right-of-fact but gentle manner (and commendably so) that the daughter may only hug and touch her close family relatives. Any boy that was non-family she could talk to freely but she wasn't allowed to hug them or sit on their lap.

"Okay?" she asked her daughter, looking to make sure the ground rules of affection she had just laid out to her  daughter were being successfully processed.

To which the daughter, in a flinch of a second, shot back "If I can't touch him then I won't to talk to him at all!"

Existential Separatism.  What can you do? :-)

To Be Existentially Hated

Sometimes you've really done nothing wrong to the girl.

She starts out building up emotion for you (or more correctly the projection she makes of you), as you simultaneously start growing emotion for her, and as time goes by emotions grow stronger and deeper until at some point along the path of getting to know you you express to her a part of your inner thoughts that doesn't "jive with her".

Let's just say for example it's the idea of wanting your wife to cover her hair and not work closely alongside other men. You've done nothing wrong. You didn't even say it in the form of a command but just an expression of what your needs are "I can't feel comfortable being married with such and such" -- totally non-assertive, just expressing your own existential feelings.

So the relationship ends. It becomes evident to both that the divides just can't be bridged. It's not practical.

Here's the jewel of an insight - She'll hate you.

(atleast for some amount of time before she can move on)

She must hate you. Your very being is a constant source of her pain. Something which draws her inner emotions into an utter fruitless frustration. Every aspect and quality of you that all along aroused in her a sense of love are now the very same knives paining her. And so she hates you. She existentially hates you. She doesn't hate you for anything you've done or said. She hates that you exist. Ouch.

And I found that my response to those silent words of "I Hate You Danny" were strangely enough - "I hate me too" -- that my being what I am existentially should distance me so from those I'd like to be close to... but what can I do, that's just honestly who I am.....

and so then I thought, maybe I'm getting somewhere in understanding the concept

חטאת לה' --הביאו עלי כפרה על שמעטתי את הלבנה

[Afterwards, I saw the same concept is to be found in the early part of Khaleed Hosseini's book "The Kite Runner" as the pain of Amir in Hassan's complete loyalty to their friendship.]