Our personal histories are created through our many stories and connections. To understand something of ourselves we have to recall some of these back stories to make sense of our present state. Sometimes we need these back stories to illuminate our friends' situations to us. Often, this is for the better and we become more compassionate because of these back stories. We see old situations and behaviours with fresh eyes and more clarity.
To tell these back stories, we all talk about our friends to our friends--maybe you've even met some of your friends' friends once or twice, but you just can't quite picture them in your mind or there's some missing piece of the puzzle, so the stories you hear don't make total sense yet you know these people. These "friends" are shadow people--people you are somehow familiar with, recognizing their names and certain facts or qualitites about them but that's it. Maybe these shadow people are friends from your past who are so faded that your memory fails you when you try to recall them. They linger in your mind as you try to piece together the bits you do know. I can think of a couple of people, one I used know pretty well and one I've only met a couple of times a long time ago, who are true shadows in my mind. I can't clearly picture them and yet their presence nags at me. My mind chews on what little I know about them while simultaneously operating in that post-dream state where it remembers some of the details and other very important bits are painfully absent. The irony is that these two keep cropping up in my daily life one way or another and I have yet to see them. It's strange how synchronicity works like that. Like the gang in Scooby Doo, I love a good mystery and love even more to solve a mystery, however, this is one that I'd prefer go silently back into the night like dreams which border on nightmare.
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