Tonight I was talking with my spiritual director about ‘life stages’. I was explaining how I find it tricky to understand why some people feel the need to ‘move on’ when they reach a new so-called life stage, the way, for example, in church when people start having children they seem to ‘graduate’ to a young families services, whilst those who are ‘stuck behind’ stay where they are. Although I count myself lucky having some friends who did not envision their new lives as they would school grades and did not graduate from being in the same boat as me, I kept reflecting on how isolated it can make me, and those like me, feel.
It frames life as this list of achievements to tick off or reach, much like a video game where you need to unlock level 1 to progress to level 2. The number of levels is set, and there is only one path way, no alternative levels for those who don’t achieve the same way.
She paused and told me she hates the phrase ‘life stage’ for this exact reason: it does not recognise the complexity of what a life stage actually is, but follows a very clear binary of having and not having. Instead she said she calls them ‘life moments’, things that change the way our life develops and happen to everyone in various forms.
A life moment is closer to those ‘you are the narrator’ type games (whatever they are called, I do many things but video games is not one of them), where you chose between a few alternatives and get to follow the story as it unfolds based on your choices. I think there was a Black Mirror episode based on this once. It’s one of those games where my friends and me all follow different narratives and get to call whatever we experience a life moment.
Right before my meeting with my spiritual director, I was watching this new show on Disney+ called Tiny Beautiful Things. (I am actually surprised I gave it a shot with that title) At some point the main character, Clare, speaks of ghostships, as the lives we don’t get to live because of decisions we make which change the course of our existences. There is a particular moment where she talks about the things she came to know and the things she would never get to know because she became a mother. This sentence sunk quite deep in me because it recognised that by making some choices or having certain experiences, we are not experiencing alternate realities and lives which come with their own set of hard earned wisdom and depth.
This sort of thinking makes room for the truth that all of us know things that our peers don’t because our lives are so unique, and vice versa: our peers know things we do not. So what if, instead of turning those into a competition to see who knows what love truly is the most based on the ‘life achievements’ they have unlocked, we could make space for the fact that we all learn deep, meaningful truths about love, all from different angles.
As a long-term single for example, what I have learnt about love is, well it’s many things, but if I have to chose right now one thing I’ve learnt it’s this:
Love is demands more love. To love someone, a friend, a family member or else, requires that I love continuously. You see if I stop loving my friends by means of being there for them, things change. We wouldn’t necessarily fall out, but over time, our connection would thin out and lose the substance deep friendships have. It’s not work, it’s attention. It’s not about keeping tabs exactly on who sent the last message or whether we talk every so many days. It’s the intention. It’s knowing that my friends hold me in their mind and I do the same with them, and it all translates into an actual friendship of exchanging thoughts, news and feelings regularly enough that we are not strangers claiming to love each other, but truly connected. Same goes with family. I live far away from mine, and it demands attention. For me to not just love my siblings and parents in thought but not in deed, demands that I attend to those relationships, that I show, albeit imperfectly, that I love them for more than the blood that makes us relatives.
Love demands attention.
I could let all these things go and not invest my time in those meaningful relationships, but again, as a long term single, I would only end up lonely. So I put attention and intention into it. Sometimes it’s a lot of effort, but I look at the alternative and it’s not appealing. To love someone demands that you love them in deed and in words not simply in thought.
As for my friends and family members who have a different angle on love because they are not single and have not been since their early twenties (for some), their experience of love is different, it has a different angle, a different flavour.
And would it not be sweet if we could look at all this hard earned wisdom on love and share it instead of evaluating who holds the truest revelation?
The truest revelation is that we did not invent love, none of us. We only get to catch glimpses of it and call it good.
Just a thought,
X
thinkandwrestle.wordpress.com 