Secrets

Show me a person whose attention does not perk up when he/she hears the word "Secret" and I will show you a person who has given up on life. Dulled by apathy. I will admit openly that I am drawn to secret like a moth to a flame.

One day I came home from work and found on my doorstep a beautiful bunch of roses with a note attached to it. Anonymous… I opened the note and found a poem:

"What is it Walk your eyes As mist on water Treading soft… What silent passion Fills the deep To frolic, foam As waves would leap … What depths! More could measure… What is it Threads your soul Mysterious as Some sunken treasure…"

I was intrigued and entranced. The whole day I wondered whom this mysterious man could be. (I hoped a man anyway.) That evening, he called and revealed himself, asking me for a date. How could I refuse? Two articles in the paper caught my attention today. One was an article "Dinner in Davos … with the "…subject of what it means to be human…" by Peter Sullivan, another "…a Secret Life, Can Be Healthy" by Benedict Carey. The debatable dinner article ended with:" Have we learnt anything? I'm not sure. Perhaps a little humanity, and a little humility. But we have certainly enjoyed it, and we walk into the -13 degrees C chilly outside with a sense of great satisfaction, now that we know that we don't know why we are human."

A secret can be so satisfying… Me meme me What am I? Should I submit? Search no more? Just live like a plant Searching for its place in the sun Growing Producing Regenerating Leaving its legacy for the next generation? It knows its meaning And its purpose Am I less than A plant?

'Psychologists say that most normal adults are well equipped to start a secret life, if not to sustain it. The ability to hold a secret is fundamental to healthy social development, they say, and the desire to sample other identities can last well into adulthood. 'In a very deep sense, you don't have a self unless you have a secret, and we all have moments throughout our lives when we feel we're losing ourselves in our social group, or work or marriage, and it feels good to grab for a secret, or some subterfuge, to reassert our identity as someone apart,' said Dr. Daniel M. Wegner,a professor of psychology at Harvard. He added, "And we are now learning that some people are better at doing this than others." Benedict Carey

This comes as no surprise to me. The following extracts from C.G.Jung 's - Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I have identified with strongly from the moment I read it.

 "Only a secret which the individual cannot betray - one which he fears to give away, or which he cannot formulate into words, and which therefore seems to belong to the category of crazy ideas - can prevent the otherwise inevitable retrogression. (Surrendering their individual goal to their craving for collective conformity…) The need for such a secret is in many cases so compelling that the individual finds himself involved in ideas and actions for which he is no longer responsible. He is being motivated neither by caprice nor arrogance, but by a dira necessitas which he himself cannot comprehend. This necessitas comes down upon him with savage fatefulness, and perhaps for the first time in his life demonstrates to him ad oculos the presence of something alien and more powerful than himself in his own most personal domain, where he thought himself the master… The man, therefore, who, driven by his daimon, steps beyond the limits of the intermediary stage, truly enters the "untrodden, untreadable regions," where there are no charted ways and no shelter spreads a protecting roof over his head. "

The above quote from Jung illustrates to me much of the path in accepting what you are as an individual, a human. For most of my life I had to live in secrecy, not daring to share because I would be thought of as crazy or forced to conform. Besides that I am a woman. Women love secrets .

The San men understood their woman when they said: "A woman's heart is like an anthill. Inside it there are so many rooms that she herself do not know them all. If a man seeks to explore of all those, he will get lost… What's more he might find in secret rooms, ashes of fires he did not ignite. Firewood for the cold winters nights when her husband and children had smacked her through her face."

My intuition tells me that most women carry within their most secretly hidden room, a secret or at least a closely guarded fantasy. These, they take out on the darkest of nights, when the cold winds of desolation sweeps through their hearts. I am no exception.

tags: jung  secrets  san  women