Courage in Closeness
On the necessity of new friendships
Personal tragedy has been pervasive these recent years: my mother passed, my marriage ended, my friends died. Living requires that we harness joy because the body can only take so much despair. I’ve found that joy in new friendships, which, as Cicero wrote “improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and dividing of our grief.”
I met some of these new friends through old friends, some through colleagues, and many just by opening myself to the possibility of finding friendships in public places. The discovery of a new connection elates me. The laughter is, of course, the best, but almost equally resonant are the moments when like meets like, when you see something in a complete stranger that matches an experience or feeling that once may have seemed singular.
That’s when a voice sneaks in to say: you are not alone in this morass of a life.
The immediacy sustains me but, haunted by recent tragedies, I can’t help but anticipate what comes after, when the resonance dulls and laughter quiets. Though the encroachment of these negativities almost certainly results from continuing grief, I think there’s an element, too, which I’ve written about much before: I’m of a faction of people constantly looking to make a narrative out of life. So, when a new connection walks onstage, of course I begin to anticipate how that scene will close.
Faced with soulful feelings, I turn to David Whyte’s Consolations, a book that gives deeper meaning to words that reflect the human condition.* He writes: “Heartbreak is unpreventable: the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight.”
Allow yourself to be tested by the simple necessity of new friendships.
Engaging in new friendship – or any relationship – means bringing someone freshly into your line of sight. It’s so easy to walk through your day without making eye contact. Allowing for the possibility of connection can always, initially, lead to rejection, but I’ve found that reception is more likely. Peeling away from the constant scrolling, it turns out we’re all looking for something – someone – real.
Whyte uses the word “Close” to describe this susceptibility. “To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.”
The prospects are simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.
Especially as the season darkens and, with it, our emotions, we must remember that it takes courage to expose oneself to the unknown, to connect with other people in the first place. Whyte writes of this, too: “It is a fundamental dynamic of human incarnation to be moved by what we feel, as if surprised by the actuality and privilege of love and affection and its possible loss. Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.”
I suppose this missive is a call to step into the unknown, to allow yourself to be tested by the simple necessity of new friendships. Given my recent experiences, the possibilities outweigh the risk.
*This is, in contrast, to the book I shared in my previous post, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which invents new words for complex feelings.