I like quick people, and I like deep people. I like quick play, and I like deep play. Life would be easier if the two were one and the same, but they very rarely are.
Quick can mean spontaneous, abrupt, and unexpected, but it doesn't have to be. There's something thrilling, though, about that sort of chance and unpredictable connection—the sort that might mean nothing tomorrow, but means everything tonight. There's an art to that kind of serendipity, one I'm learning late. People treat it like it's a drug, because it is: the fleeting high that, by its nature, cannot last. Some moments can't be planned, only trusted.
More than that, I like quick people: sharp, piercing, restless ones. The sort that fence. The sort that can't sit still. There are many ways, of course, to be quick, some ways incompatible with the others. Those who joust fare poorly with those who roam too much to stay on the field. This gives rise to a sort of meta-quickness, a quickness of quicknesses: those who realize which kind of game is being played, and can shift themselves to playing it. Or to subverting it, if they can find a charming way to throw their foe off-guard.
But quickness isn't depth. Cherish wit too much, and you'll miss the ways in which pith does not equate to meaning. So I am drawn, too, to the ones who know how to search. The ones for whom the journey is long, and difficult, and yields rewards commensurate to how truly you sought what you were looking for. The ones for whom easy answers to not suffice.
Where quick people respond to you with an immediate awareness, a sense that this very moment is alive and ripe with promise, deep people give off a strange sense of stability. Where they are now is where they'll be a minute from now, with slight variations that slowly, carefully unfold. Depth is never quick: profound, abrupt insight does happen, but even then you must commit yourself to the profundity; a shocking revelation reveals nothing if you blink and look away. To see it is to keep seeing it. To know it is to remember it. To share it is to find different ways of saying the same thing.
Deep people, mind you, can be the most tedious of bores. When you find something of lasting worth, all the baubles and the trinkets and the distractions have a tendency to melt away. Which is a shame, for those of us who like that sort of thing. Some mistakenly think that their calm is the only way to see the world; they think of themselves in terms of oceans and gentle breezes, and forget that typhoons are just as substantial, just as real.
The ones I like the most are the ones who are both: the ones who dance towards life, rather than merely through it. The ones for whom causes ought to be joyous, but who see joy in the cause itself. The ones who think movements ought to be graceful and surprising, and also lead somewhere. The wise ones who aren't too serious to wink. The tricksters whose jokes shock us into seeing, and laughing at, the world.
There's no trick to being both at once, apart from valuing each for what it is. So many of each sort grow defensive about the other, simply because it isn't what they know, and because they fail to see how it might be worthwhile to them. The quick ones resent how the deep doesn't immediately yield to their charms. The deep ones scoff at the quicknesses for not going anywhere, for not leading immediately to more.
(They each, I suspect, resent the other for having what they don't, and for having it by being something which the other is not. They hate that having it requires being different. We each fear and loathe whatever we are not: we find it easier to scoff at what's different, and to pretend there's nothing there to value or desire, than to admit that we would like to be something more than what we are—or that we're scared we can't become it.)
The deepness that lasts, and the quickness that sustains. The momentary sparks that dance across the surface of the eternal. We, too, are fleeting and deep. We last for ages; we last for eyeblinks. Ours is a celebration of what will always be, of what will never be again.
