The hard way
“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
Adrienne Rich
Sure enough, I agree. What is “that hard way”? Whatever I might have imagined to be smooth enthusiasm and enduring love the other idea, is now a bundle of nerves rushing through my stomach, filling my mind’s space, pressing me to make a big decision where no such drama is necessary.
I know this place.
A relationship is blooming into a new phase. Conflicts are inevitably part of it, the only way out is through. The depth of the appreciation, the rightfulness of the relational compositions, the co-occurring complexity, some felt clinging and avoiding on both ends, turn it into an intimidating process. I feel a deep inner urge to disclose my truths, to confess, with a somewhat desperate longing to co-create a blank piece of paper, an emotional tabula rasa, on which I imagine a redrawing of the relational conditions, cleansing all the projections, all the childlike reaching out and the hardened self-protection.
Probability is, things will get messier, feel a bit more chaotic, and, as such, demand more trust and surrendering, more communicative clarity and experimental progress. I can’t do right what has been wronged in the farther-reaching past. I will do wrong, and I will only learn about what is right by allowing a mutual wrongdoing to inform our relational evolution.
It is in the eyes of this dearest friend that I self-recognize a continuous refinement of truths. It is not an inner pressing, overarching set of standards, it is an embodied alchemy of values expressing themselves through ongoing, fragile openness, renewed humbleness, and full-fledged appreciation of differences leading to an unknown dance of two bodies trying to break-down vulnerability into controllable motions and characters. Can we stretch wide enough to accommodate each other’s emotional reach?
Reality is teaching me to surrender beyond a highly educated role, beyond the position best suited for a convincing transcendence of old pains, even paid for. Reality is asking me to deeply look into the pain, and acknowledge how the other, just by being who they are, is inviting me to embrace it unconditionally, to open towards the evenly justifiable experience of deep pleasure, the beauty of a unique connection amid frightening uncertainties and a deep-rooted need for security. Will the other go the hard way with me?
Do we ever have another question in mind?
How grateful to be dancing with lightening, to be inspired - and contained - by the complexity and intensity of everyone of my friends, of every one of the relationships born out of striking love.