Monday, December 26, 2016

Love (2.0) and Friendship

[a moment of silence please to appreciate my clever Jane Austen reference in the title...]

Last week I finished a book called "Friendship for Grownups."  It didn't say anything I didn't already know, but was a good reminder of the importance of friendships in a woman's life.  When I finished the book I started thinking about friendship in my life right now.  I feel like I'm in a strange place, caught in between the demands of my life, the needs of my family, and the amount of energy I have available.  Friendship looks different to me right now than it did before we moved to Oregon.

I decided that I would pray for guidance to know if there's more I should be doing now in the area of friendship.

------

I was at work on Wednesday and two patients were waiting by my reception desk.  I had been chatting with one of them and she made a comment about not liking to backtrack when she was out running errands.  That made me laugh, because I HATE backtracking!  I've recently been fussing at myself for being so neurotic about it, and have tried to tell myself that if I have to drive in the direction that I just came from all will not be lost.  When I told her that I hated backtracking too, the other woman started laughing and said that she was the same way!  We talked for a few minutes about how crazy this thing makes us and how our husbands (mostly) don't understand, and we laughed and laughed.

-------

Wednesday after work I was at the dentist getting my teeth cleaned.  The hygienist was super chatty which was fun except that it's hard to have a two-way conversation when you're having your teeth cleaned!  At some point she was telling me that she has a problem with sounds, and she started describing some kinds of sounds that bother her.  (The bathroom fan, her always-drumming-on-something husband.)  When she next had her fingers out of my mouth I said, "I'm just the same way!  I hate repetitive sounds, and almost all sounds when I'm tired."  Then I told her that I had learned about a syndrome called misophonia, sometimes thought of as a hatred of sound.  We talked about the sounds that make us crazy and how frustrating this is our lives.

------

When I got home and was thinking back over my day, still feeling some of the emotions of the day, I had a memory.  In the first year or so that we lived here I read a book called Love 2.0.  The author (a professor at UNC) redefines love not just as a something that we're depending on our significant others to provide for us, but also as micro-moments of connection between people—even strangers.

When that came to mind I had an ah-ha moment.  I hadn't thought of the Love 2.0 micro-moments in a long time, but I realized as this came to my mind that I'd had two significant Love 2.0 moments that day, moments that had been fun, joyous, in the one case filled with laughter (it's too hard to laugh much when someone's hand and a sharp object are in your mouth) and in both cases really satisfying.  

------

I think this was an answer to my prayer--not just having these two experiences in the same day, but also having such a clear recollection of them instead of them just being rolled into the detritus of the day, and then having the memory of the Love 2.0 book.  I think this answer was showing or reminding me that there are different kinds of connection that can be emotionally satisfying in my life.  It's definitely something I need to keep praying about, but I love seeing this answer.

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Magic connections

There's some magic in a real connection, I think.  You can't guarantee it will happen, you can't make it happen, you can just hope.  A lot of the time Russ & I live our lives in our normal pattern.  Normal hugs before and after work, normal kisses in the kitchen, normal conversation about what just happened or what's coming up.  But sometimes, usually later at night, magic happens and there's a different connection, a connection beyond the mundane.  Then we talk and talk and talk.  Work issues and resolutions, interactions, stories, frustrations, laughter about excel files that are just moments from becoming sentient.  Laughing and listening and knowing that we're going to really pay for this late night tomorrow, but always so glad it happened.

You can't make it happen, I've tried before.  That's how I know that when it does happen it's magic.