I’ve discovered an interesting blog that synthesizes mindfulness and just about everything else. Evelyn Rodriguez of Crossroads Dispatches does an excellent job quilting together a variety of ideas from a wide arrays of sources and providing her perspective. In a recent post reflecting on a study that announced how much more isolated we are becoming, the following grabbed me by the shirt-tail. I am compelled to share.
We live in an age where we collect ‘friends’ like trading cards on MySpace, Tribe, LinkedIn (David Sifry’s quip), and as in any age it is habitual to keep the bolt of our heart fastened. I know in my own life I’ve said I want intimacy, but I’ve often run in the opposite direction. My therapist was my close confidant four years ago. (Less than the whopping average of 2.08 the study cites – thank god for those fractional friends!)
Today I easily count at least eight extremely close friends; friends I can count on to discuss the bread and wine of life, and ones that would share their last dollar with me as I with them if need be.
Paradoxically, at the same time every person that enters my life in person, however briefly, be it in line for a jasmine green tea with tapioca pearls at the mall or sitting across from me at Peet’s or riding BART into the city enters my life like a momentary shooting star and is my best friend at least while they are in my presence, even though we may never meet again physically, tangibly, they have my full attention now. I’ve had conversations on near-death experiences, God, sex, unconditional love, divorce, heartbreak, art, everything under the moon with complete strangers on a weekly, and damn near daily, basis of late.
So-called strangers, momentary shooting stars, kindred spirits, while not counted among our 2.08 confidants, give me the felt sense that if time and space were unbounded, every being in the world could become my dearest cherished friend.
—Everyone’s Famous to 2.08 Friends
Evelyn also comments on the trend among her blogging community away from trying to track the hundreds of great blogs daily. It’s true for me as well. I am religious about checking on about one dozen blogs on a daily basis. I track many more via Bloglines, but I sometimes wait until a number of posts accrue before I visit. There just isn’t time to read them all and actually live my life. Evelyn notes, “p.s. You don’t track your friends.”
As for the concept of momentary shooting star friends (a wonderful metaphor!) is admit that I am often closed tightly to these opportunities. Yet I have longed to be more open, and when I was younger, I often was. What prevents me from encountering people in this way? Compassion fatigue? Fear of too much (whatever that would be)? Selfishness?
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It’s a slow day at work when I am writing this post. I am alone in the office. The phone rang. An elderly woman who doesn’t drive, whose son died in March, and whose husband has cancer was referred to Hands On Bay Area from another agency because she needs transportation assistance. That agency clearly doesn’t understand what we do, because we don’t provide a service like that. I explained, and she said, “I guess they just told me this to get me off the phone.” Being the knowledge geek that I am, I quickly searched the web for Meals on Wheels, because I remembered the one in Austin had a transportation service as well as a grocery shopping service (they didn’t just deliver hot meals). Apparently the Austin agency is the only MOW that offers this. I felt for her, so I took her number and said I’d do a little research on her behalf. She sounded so relieved. She’s been calling number after number without success. A Google search reveals a paucity of services in the Peninsula (or if services exist, they require needle-in-a-haystack searching). She lives less than 8 miles north of the MOW in Menlo Park, but they don’t serve Belmont. Calling the alternate number on their site for her area got me to another agency that also doesn’t serve Belmont, but I was given another phone number that might prove fruitful. I will call her back and give her the information and hope that one of them will be useful. She sounded worn and overwhelmed.
An entire generation of people will create a canyon of need in just a few years, and communities are woefully unprepared to help home-bound and low-income seniors navigate life in a car-based culture.
—
It occurred to me as I wrote the vignette above that I just had a “shooting star” type of encounter. Perhaps by slowing down, observing, and opening my heart just a bit more, I can have more of these without being overwhelmed.
Another reason this is all a-stir for me is that I’m reading a marvelous (and I mean that!) book given to me by Cicada (thank you, dear woman) that focuses on slowing down and truly seeing one’s life, and recording it in illustrated journals. It’s called The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to be the Artist You Truly Are by Danny Gregory. He wrote another book I’d love to read, Everyday Matters; it’s a visual memoir. His stance is that the ordinariness of life is chock full of riches and wonder if we just pay attention and take a little time to record what we experience. He has a wonderful blog as well, which features a group called Everyday Matters where people participate in weekly drawing challenges; people post the images on Flickr. When I encounter such books encouraging people to embrace the concept of being creative themselves, my gut flutters with a sense of urgency, a recognition that I too want to nurture people’s creativity. I don’t know how or when, but I do know it’s becoming imperative, a calling of sorts.
The trip to Austin was a clarifying experience for me. It made me realize that I must let go of the idea of returning there to live. We moved here tentatively and I put my therapy profession on hold but kept my license. Attending the continuing education courses required to keep my license active reminds me of the fact that I cannot practice my profession here, and my energy and time could be used otherwise. Holding onto this vestige of my profession is one factor preventing me from living fully in the present. I’m going to contact the Texas licensing board and find out what I need to do to put change my status and put my license on hiatus (I was told that’s possible). Someday perhaps we’ll move to another state that does offer reciprocity, and I can return to that. But not now. And this job ends in October, which means opportunities abound. Whatever is next will include creativity somehow. I’m trading in one license for another…
