I neglected to mention the best part about the past week: two sets of casual conversations with wonderful, calm, sensible friends – neither of whom unfortunately live anywhere near me. Such a valuable thing, really the most wonderful thing, and something I miss a great deal: in Hong Kong, Australia, and northern England (that is to say, for the past nine years of my life), although I've had good friends in all those places, I haven't had the easy, local support of someone who can listen, who doesn't work where I do, who has the calm reserves of wisdom that are worth so much. I've tended to depend on occasional phone calls, e-mails – Jay, Trisha, Terry, Philip, and other remarkable, sensible, thoroughly sane people, scattered all over the world.
It's a difficult thing, not to have that kind of deep support, which was always remarkably common for me in California (both in San Francisco and Los Angeles, though admittedly slightly more so in the former). People acculturated to connect with their own and others' emotions, people who are developed enough to have the necessary ability to reflect, not the kind who simply respond with more complaints or neuroses of their own....
Of course, it probably reflects on my own development, or lack thereof. In line with some (admittedly fairly mystical) systems like Jungian developmental psychology, or Hindu ideas about spiritual awareness, or even est – a shameful confession: I took a lot of est seminars in the 1980s, and actually learned a lot there – we tend to find our own level: we gather to us people who are at our level of development. Which would mean, rather disappointingly, that although I've met a number of kind and supportive people in my life, it is significant that I don't generally end up working or living around the best of them. At least I'm far enough ahead to bump into those people, to make friends with them, to recognize how special they are. But evidently not far enough along to belong in the immediate spaces around them.
Maybe in a couple of lifetimes....
Comments