Last night I started reading the book Frientimacy* by Shasta Nelson. I first became aware of the book when the Transformation-Cafe podcast chose it for a book club selection last summer; I bought it at that time. My attention was captured in the first chapter. Nelson reports that when she asks audiences, "Do you wish you had more deep and meaningful friendships?" nearly every hand rises. She asked over 12,000 women about their relationships, and over half reported that their friendships weren't very satisfying.
My March 5 blogpost "Warm Fuzzies" revealed that I am in a season of examining the state of my own friendships. It should not be surprising then that Frientimacy, which has been on my nightstand for three-quarters of a year, should "suddenly" grab my attention.
I've written previously about the Buddhist concept that "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." This week has been rich with opportunities to examine the state of my friendships. I have to say that for at least the last two or three years, if I had been in Nelson's audience, my hand would have registered affirmatively when asked about wanting deeper and more meaningful friendships. For a long time, I accepted responsibility. A definite clue to the problem was that I needed to schedule lunches with friends months in advance.
Then I started making time, and I found that some people were still not available, yet others would leap tall buildings to make sure we could get together. This week I spent really rich time with two friends. At the end of each, I felt even closer. In the same period of time one person that I've considered a close friend avoided responding to an email, and another said she could make time in the 3rd Quarter, as if she were scheduling me in her business plan.
After several weeks away from my Spanish lessons, I started listening again today as I walked my errands on a gorgeous spring day. Many/most latin languages make a distinction in grammar in the form of a verb that is used to address a close friend as opposed to the verb that is used for an acquaintance. I kept stumbling on the distinction as I practiced responding to prompts during my lessons. When I was supposed to be replying to a close friend, I'd use the form for an acquaintance.
About an hour into the lessons, it occurred to me that this may be what is going on in my life...except in reverse. I want "close friends," but I've been addressing those who want to be responded to as "acquaintances." Suddenly it came to me that these are twice-a-year, thin-coating-of-friendship people required the formal version of the verb. I say this while fully recognizing that that my comfort level with relationships may often have been varying layers of veneer. Unknowingly, I may have teed these relationships up with that expectation.
I really value those that I had good times with in a veneer sort of way. But that's just not sufficient for me anymore. I want the deep and meaningful friendships of which Nelson writes. As the title of the book suggests, intimacy is the vessel through which we have those relationships.
Over 20 years ago, my understanding of intimacy was profoundly shaped by my author friend Mark Youngblood in his book Life at the Edge of Chaos. He describes "intimacy" as "in-to-me-see." I spent several days in meditation around this concept after reading it. I recognized the barriers I put up to people seeing into my heart. I ached for days.
While I craved intimacy, I recognized that I had at least two problems with it. First, connected silence is essential. Walk to the edge of something really uncomfortable and take a deep breath--kind of like jumping off the high dive. Except in friendship, we walk to the edge, take a deep breath, and dive together. There is a level of tension that comes with just sitting with someone while they work up courage to metaphorically jump. While I think I am very good with this my profession, I am lousy at it in my personal life. Changing the subject has been my habit more often than I'd like to admit.
The second challenge that I have had is with the people I attract into my life. Like a homing pigeon, I can find the people who will be incapable of intimacy with uncanny accuracy. Clearly, I have begun to shift that trend, as witnessed by those intimate conversations I've had recently. If they can't go there, then I have been able to say that I want the intimacy, and I can still be rescued from the responsibility required to create it.
This is about love--the kind of divine love that I've written about at length...what connects us all. We can't get there until we drop the barriers and let others see into our hearts and souls. In one of the best-selling books of all time--The Road Less Traveled--author M. Scott Peck actually describes love as "The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."
In that definition I believe that he has described intimate friendship. I see into my own heart. I see into the heart of my friend. I let my friends see into me. We jump together. We both grow. Love grows between us and in the Universe as well. Perhaps the reason so many of us crave it so is that the world needs. I started to write that I couldn't do superficial any more, but the truth is that I can: I am just unwilling. I am setting for the power of my intention to attract more intimate relationships for the rest of my life AND to have the courage to step into them.
In the richness of my exploration, perhaps what I am finding is me.
*Frientimacy by Shasta Nelson, Seal Press, 2016.
*Life at the Edge of Chaos, Mark Youngblood, Perceval Publishing, 1997.
*The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck, M.D., Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1978.
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