Becoming who we will be is a process ripe with comedy, drama, danger and fulfillment. And yet we’re so entangled in our own bodies and stories that we only occasionally catch clear sight of this entertaining and enigmatic adventure.

Some theoretical physicists believe many dimensions beyond the three we perceive are enfolded inside ordinary reality. These secret vistas hiding within every atom may contain the mysterious, missing dark matter that at this very moment is making the unimaginably massive galaxies fly apart like startled green-winged teal. It sometimes feels our own most essential selves play hide-and-seek around just such corners.

All this is a fancy way of saying that I was surprised to observe myself learning something last week, how our lives are never really stale and inert unless we permit them to be. Too often, I fall into a dismissive habit of thinking people are like snowballs that become progressively slower, larger and ponderous as they roll downhill. This need not be so.

Age 10 is a safe space for figuring out clues, for tentatively beginning to decipher the invisible instruction booklet to life – the encrypted code of adulthood – which we grownups all know is written in badly translated Chinese and lost amidst the wrapping paper anyway in a thoughtless rush to play with our newest toys.

No matter how difficult and fraught this exploration is, I was eager to see what my inquisitive daughter Elizabeth would make of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Shakespearean Festival in Ashland last week.

My parents undoubtedly had similar “cultural enrichment” motives for allowing/insisting that my big brother Greg take me along to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film version of the play, when I was 10 myself. Aside from getting promptly ditched so Greg could go make-out with a flesh-and-blood teenage girl, it was a movie that cut an indelible impression regarding the possibilities for passion and the irresistible cascade of consequences it may capriciously unleash. Growing up in a remote mountain valley with one fuzzy TV channel, it was a revelation – and not merely because of Olivia Hussey’s awe-inspiring nude scene. Thus far exposed only to my parents’ chaste kisses and polite hugs, “Romeo and Juliet” was a vivid if misleading path toward sexual awareness and the relentless flood tide of maturity.

So I stole glances at my daughter as September bats flitted through the stage lights at Ashland’s open-air Elizabethan theater, searching for something in the light of her eyes. It was a funny production of the play, one seemingly designed for audience weaned on the teen and “tween” comedies of Nickelodeon and Disney Channel – Mercutio’s death scene was hilarious, something I distinctly do not recall in the movie. But whether emotionally intrigued or simply entertained, Elizabeth sat enraptured through the whole three hours. I hope she came away with a richer understanding of the volatile and indispensable possibilities of love, and not so much with the Bard’s soap-operatic excesses.

This possibility of capturing gossamer yet profound lessons from one another came spinning down powerfully over me the next morning, which we spent chasing lizards in Oddfellows Cemetery, looking for Mother Giles. My great-grandparents, William and Kitty Giles, are buried in Grants Pass, where they retired in 1919. Though I’ve long desired to pay my respects and I offered Elizabeth a $20 finder’s fee, they somehow eluded us.

But in another sense, I found my great-grandmother, in an obituary in the Grants Pass Daily Courier archives. Defying the “just the facts” policy of many newspaper obits today, hers actually told me something I yearned to learn about her: “‘Mother Giles,’ as she was known to all her neighbors, will be missed more than words can express. She was mother to all with whom she came in contact. Her interest in the affairs of her neighbors, her cheerful greeting, kindly and helpful advice and sympathetic understanding, endeared her to all.”

Nearing the end of her long and storied life, Kitty was interested in and connected to the people around her. This vital bond is sorely lacking in so many of us today, ensconced behind our strong doors and bright computer screens, with their flickering illusions.

Life, so rich and tasty, is something we must daily renew in each other, eye to eye and heart to heart. Life is not a stage. This I resolve to remember.

Chinook Observer editor Matt Winters lives in Ilwaco with wife and daughter.