The Portrait of...a Simple Gray Man

It was a hot Friday evening and I couldn't resist the call of my friend so we went out to meet one Simple Gray Man.

The details aren't important, like why we met, where we met and what we did. The most important was that we were spectators to one man show.

As it was my first conversation with this guy, let's call him Dorian, I did expected and was ready for the we are so familiar with routine of: "How are you?" "What do you say about this hot weather?" "What do you do for a living?" and so on.

We barely sat down when Dorian adopted a theatrical posture and after one short pause, to grab our attention, he said:

"Life is simple, we are the ones who are complicating it."

I was astonished.
At first I was satisfied thinking I will not have to play all that social charade and that maybe would have some real fun with one real person, with no social roles to play.

But, boy, I was wrong.

Dorian is an performer, a social performer. So, after grabbing our attention with "Life is simple bla bla bla" he went on his story-telling crusade.
In this way we learned about his two past relationships, on how he is struggling to become a more determined human, on how he reads motivational literature and so on. We learned things that we weren't interested in.

The subjects that he approached weren't big or small, important or boring. What I enjoyed was the performance itself: theatrical pauses, gestures, mimics were as colored as a parrot itself. I wasn't paying attention anymore to the content Dorian was sharing but to the way he changed and changed during his performance. He was on a stage and we were his public.

Unfortunately for him, I got more and more interested in the psyche behind all this, so I begun interrupting him with stupid questions and after I got him off line,asked him to continue his story.

His body language changed from aggressive and confident into one defensive and almost depressive.

Poor Dorian...the non-gray shade of human being. He was on a stage performing for an audience, and the audience replied back and became interactive. He was puzzled.

I started to ask him deep questions like: "I see you are continuous looking for something and I can notice that you're not happy at all. What is missing in your life? What are you looking for?"

The performer just melted down and a depressed Dorian surfaced. Again he was interested in just himself and he looked at me like I was the Delphi Oracle with answers to true happiness. He was complaining that he keeps on missing the human interaction, that he wants to be more determined, that he wants to be able to enjoy human life than just living it.

I told him more about listening, about paying attention to simple things but then I stopped. No, I am not entitled to give advices, recommendations on what to do. I don't hold the supreme truth, the meaning of life. I may appear to know more, to feel more than the rest but then again, I am just as trapped in this show called "life" as any of you. It is not my call or my place to make judgments.

I saw a portrait of a self-absorbed human being, unhappy ego-centric human being when life is so much more than just YOURSELF.