The Understory: Discovering the Hidden Depths Beneath the Surface of Life and Relationships
Many years ago I became friends through other friends with a young man who had lost the use of his arms and legs. He was at a river with some friends in a boat, and he took a dive from the back of the boat into what he was sure was pretty deep water. It wasn’t. His spinal column was severely damaged from the impact of the top of his head contacting the bottom of the river or a boulder in the river that he didn’t see from the boat. From the boat, the river looked deep. The surface lied.
The surface lied. The surface lied! This is a truth that we don’t consider often enough. Even in clear water, you don’t see the full story. How often do we pause to consider the hidden depth behind someone’s actions or life’s events? Even in clear water, you don’t see the full story.
The Surface We See
You may call yourself an open book, but you can’t be completely open. Due partly to the passage of time, you’re still presenting a curated version of yourself. There are things from your awkward phase — everyone has an awkward phase, even if it’s a private admission — that you’d rather nobody remember. You may not be living for the approval of others, but there are certainly situations where you present only the best of you to other people. If you’re honest with yourself, you can recognize it. And it’s fine!
Social media is an environment that provides us with a perfect example of that. It’s not just there, though. Many of us keep our personal life separate from our professional life. That’s a self-preservation technique, and I know I’ve done it nearly everywhere I’ve worked. There’s nothing wrong with either persona, I just like to keep them separate.
Sometimes, I keep a mask on when I’m meeting someone casually and I don’t expect to see them again. I really don’t care if they realize how brilliant I am, and it doesn’t bother me if they think I’m a socially awkward nerd. Their opinion doesn’t matter to me if there’s no chance they’ll have any influence later on.
Be that as it may, it’s important to acknowledge that surface-level impressions can lead to misunderstandings. In a three-minute exchange at an airport where one person is going west and the other person is going east, it probably doesn’t matter. The likelihood of meeting again, let alone being in influential relationships, is small.
Let’s look at something closer to home. Let’s look at the visitor at church. She comes in and sits at the back alone. You can see certain things. You can see her hair, her face, her clothing. You can see what she carried in with her – her handbag, or a cane, or a scripture case. You can see if she is displaying any expression. You may know what method of conveyance brought her here.
What you can’t see, unless you know this visitor, is what happened on the way to church. You can’t see what happened as she was getting ready. You can’t see what happened last night. You can’t see what happened yesterday. You can’t see what happened last week, last month, last year, five years ago, in her childhood. You don’t know exactly what brought her here today. You don’t know what scars she carries, physically, mentally, emotionally. You don’t know how much she knows about Jesus, or if she even knows He loves her. You. Don’t. Know.
The Personal Understory
It can be a challenge to perceive the hidden stories within each person. We all have fears, hopes, struggles, and experiences that we hold out to the world for inspection, and we have some of each of those that we retain close within ourselves. Someone who looks quite confident may be battling anxiety or past trauma. Some very famous performers admit to feeling physically ill before each performance.
When you meet someone, you’ve each taken a different path to the table. Even if it looks like a similar path, they’re seeing the path from their eyes on their side of the road, and you’re seeing it from your eyes on your side of the road. Their side of the road has stones and holes in different places than your side has, and you’re walking your side of the road with your legs having traveled your road. You haven’t had the same tumbles and spills that they have had.
Furthermore, you can only see this road that they’re on, if you can see any road that they’re on. You don’t know which journeys before this one have had them beset by highwaymen, which roads ended abruptly at the edge of a precipice, and which ones were perfectly smooth and uneventful. Because you haven’t walked their road, with their legs, and seen things through their eyes, your understanding of them is surfacial at best, until they divulge pieces of themselves to you. Even then, you still only know what they divulge.
Always remember that.
Situational Complexity
The mysteries of relationships become even more complex when we consider that we only spend a portion of a time sequence in the presence of any other person. In a workspace, you’re in the presence of your colleagues for the work day, and then you all retire to your respective homes. Tomorrow you’ll all come in again. But for those approximately sixteen hours that you’re away from each other, each of you has continued living a life about which the other knows little or nothing.
I have what I consider to be really smart kids. I’m a mother, of course I think they’re smart. I have one, however, who has difficulty taking tests. This one is fine with all the material, can recite and explain it, but if they sit to take a test, they struggle to find the confidence in their answers. This wonderful person is a great speaker and leader, but loses faith in themselves when they sit at a test. They had a teacher one year that told me that my child should be in advanced classes, but class placement was assigned based on test results. This teacher reached beyond what he saw on the surface and helped my child gain the confidence they needed to learn how to work a test to their advantage, and as a result, my child was able to excel throughout high school. (I used a neutral pronoun so that those who know me personally won’t be able to tell which of my children it was.)
I learned throughout 2020 that what you see on the surface tells you very little. You may think there’s no reason for someone to wear a mask in the car. Do you know for absolute certain that that person has a healthy respiratory system, that they have a healthy immune system, that the car is their own car, that they aren’t picking someone up later with a compromised immune system, that nobody has been in the car that has a communicable disease? If all you see of that person is at a stoplight, then no, you don’t know.
Perception vs. Reality
Our perceptions are shaped by our own experiences, our biases, and our own limited information. Remember back to my post on The Six Biases. You will form opinions on things in order to make them familiar to you, whether you realize you’re doing it or not.
A woman told of an experience she had while she was driving on a city street. Behind her, a vehicle struck a bicyclist, hurling the bicyclist through the air in front of the woman in her car. She later said that she was sure that it was a mannequin flying through the air. A psychologist explained that she was experiencing one of the biases I didn’t cover, Normalcy Bias. When we see, hear, or experience something that our minds can’t make sense of, it fills in the missing parts with familar facts. The woman’s mind couldn’t comprehend a real human body flying through the air, because bodies don’t fly — unless they are propelled by a force, but her mind didn’t have that information, so it substituted another fact, that it wasn’t a body, but a mannequin.
It’s a similar phenomenon to the one that will have you singing the wrong lyrics to a song for years because your mind didn’t have access to the real ones, and then the real ones sound strange. Strange or not, you had the wrong ones. You know it’s happened to you.
If you can be wrong about song lyrics, can you accept the very real possibility that you’ve been wrong about other things? Like why someone is staggering (maybe a blood sugar issue instead of drink), or why someone is wearing a mask in the car (they have a sensitive respiratory issue and have trouble with the fumes from carpet cleaner) or why someone never comes out for drinks with the rest of the office (they’re not antisocial, they care for an elderly parent). They don’t have to tell you, you don’t have a right to know, and you don’t have a right to draw conclusions without facts. Maybe it’s harsh to accept, but most of what goes on in the world has very little to do with any of us in the individual.
Empathy and Understanding
Everyone has an Understory – that part of themselves that they keep to themselves. We don’t have to know that Understory for it to matter to us. We can recognize and acknowledge that Understory and allow it to lead us to greater empathy. Approaching others with curiosity and kindness instead of judgment can transform our interactions.
Have you ever made an inconsiderate driving decision that got someone else riled up? You probably had a decent explanation. Your mind was on an unpleasant conversation you were going to have to have with an employee; you were worried about a wayward child; you were mentally planning a weekend getaway. None of these things are bad, are they? But it happens. We lose momentary focus. Guess what — so do other drivers. Maybe we can keep that in mind the next time another driver annoys us.
The Forest Metaphor: Growth in the Understory
A forest has four “stories,” or layers of growth. The topmost layer is called the Emergent layer, and it’s the very tippy-top of the tallest trees, taller than most of the forest trees. The next layer is the Canopy, the tops of most of the trees. Further down we have the Understory, and then the Forest Floor. The Forest Floor is where that decomposition occurs, the recreation of soil from decaying plant and animal matter. But the Understory – this is the layer beneath the Canopy. It’s the smaller trees, shrubs, and young saplings that haven’t reached the full sunlight of the Canopy. This layer is the layer that represents the future potential of the forest, because the next generation of the forest Canopy emerges from here. The most massive growth happens in the Understory.
The same is true of humanity. Our outside life, the one we show to the world, is fed by the growth in our individual Understories. Those parts of ourselves that we hold deep within our emotional worlds, those are the parts that will nourish our outer Emergent and Canopy layers. We each are responsible for our own growth, but while we’re nurturing our own individual Understory, it’s always going to be valuable to remember that someone else’s Understory is still developing them into someone different than the person they are today. Every relationship, every encounter, offers us the chance to accept that knowledge without judgment, and to just step back and let them grow through their Understory to their full being.
Your Turn
Knowing now that there’s always more than meets the eye, we are better prepared to approach people and situations with an open mind and an open heart. Seek out the Understory in your daily interactions. What stories are you missing? Drop a comment and let me hear about a time when you discovered someone else’s – or your own – Understory.
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