FROM THE BOUNDARY – ‘Love one another…’ – Part two

 

Last week I wrote of love, what I called ‘love in the ordinary’, and contrasted it with mere civility which these days is becoming rare enough. I made the point that increasingly in the daily round – and I’m not just talking about Barbados – we’re increasingly becoming not simply strangers but also aliens to each other, and that for so many there’s only ‘I/ME’ at the centre of things. It’s a world where though ultimately we sustain each other, paradoxically there’s so much loneliness because we’ve ceased to relate. Some while ago, I was on a train when two young women sat opposite me both thumping their iPhones. The one said to the other, “I’m texting Jeremy.” The other said, “But you don’t like Jeremy.” “I know”, the first responded. “But I have no friends.” You what? Sad isn’t it?
 
I wonder if any of you have read Erica Jong’s “Fear of Flying”, a best-selling novel of the ‘70s. It’s a story about the sexual fantasy of the heroine, Isadora Wing, who’s married to a psychologist and seeks what she calls the ‘zipless f…’. By that she means a sexual encounter for its own sake between complete strangers, a one off without emotional entrapment or commitment, and with no ulterior motive or challenge. It happens, if it happens, by chance – on a plane or train, in a lift, on the beach, anywhere where people are irresistibly drawn to each other. There’s no power game and no strings. The woman is not the ‘giver’, nor the man the ‘taker’. There’s giving and taking on both sides, a shared hospitality, in which each is a visitor and each a host. If you think about it, and leaving aside the sexual element, you might say without perversion that it’s a very pure thing, perhaps the purest there is in human relationships, and when it happens we’re rarely aware of it.
 
Now: relate, if you will, the idea of ‘ziplessness’ to these relationships and encounters where there’s the same mutuality but nothing inevitably more. This is the condition precedent for the ‘love’ I’m talking about. The ‘love’ is not for friends or special darlings, but simply for people we meet casually in the world, day by day, to whom, for a moment, we relate before moving on. The encounters give expression to our union with life, to our shared humanity, to our interdependence, to our aspirations to happiness – and so they have the imprint of blessedness.
 
In these zipless moments there’s often great joy, as well as self-questioning and laughter. If there’s a joke, it may be on us. Since the moment is authentic, the masks we habitually wear, so often very polite ones, are stripped away. The encounters are one of the things which, as they say, make life worth living – and we experience them most days of our lives though we don’t treasure them as we should.
 
The zipless encounters speak of relationship in the present. There may be neither tomorrows nor yesterdays. Our commitment is to the adventure of NOW, one where we release energy in ourselves and the other in a way which recognises the value of people but without demand. That’s the zipless world.
 
It’s a world where we’re not engulfed by nervous breakdowns, or betrayals, or painful rejection or control – though they may not be too far below the surface and we might feel them scratching away under it. But if we do confront them, it lasts only for a moment, though that, the moment, may create an empathy as real as death, and as lasting. There are rarely tears, and with each encounter we sail into the open seas of life with the freedom to make our own discoveries about ourselves and those we meet but free from chaos.
 
Of course, there may be an element of eros, and so of risk. In the zipless world there may well be physical attraction in one or other, maybe both, but again it’s not necessary. Whatever the precise nature of these preludes without end, this sanitised foreplay, there’ll always be a reaching out to whoever comes our way, and a release of that part of our very nature which we call ‘love’. And why not: don’t we all have a disposition to affection and don’t we all instinctively seek happiness in warm heartedness to others – well maybe, and if not why not?
 
In traditional understandings, I suppose the nearest which approximates to this is ‘philia’, the love of the affections, where the presence of the other is a delight, where there’s a kind of ‘holy touching’, natural and spontaneous. It probably won’t translate into the depth of friendship, but it will entail the mutuality of well-wishing in which the other is treated as oneself  – and this is broad enough to include the situation which Aristotle calls the ‘friendship of utility’ where there’s buying and selling. Even that, you see, might spark the mutual exchange of affection and regard.
 
Perhaps you might like to think of all those in your daily round, your zipless moments, with whom circumstance entails you relate. Maybe there’s the postman, the counter-clerk, the waitress in the coffee shop, the assistant in the smart store, the pharmacist, the manager, the taxi driver, the ballet dancer, the student, the traffic warden or policewoman, the doctor, the unemployed someone and doubtless many more.
 
At this moment, I think of the lovely girl in the coffee shop who once, when I returned from holiday in the UK, said ever so simply “Welcome back, Clifford: the usual?” Or again, the girls in the supermarket who told my wife and I that they’d missed us. And yet again, the lovely people at my local post office who do their job so efficiently and well but always with smiles and a sense of fun so we become pals. Nor must I forget the former parishioners who remember me and tell me they miss me. You know, all that means a lot to me in a land not my own. This ‘love’ I’m speaking of, you see, cuts across all social conventions and classes, and it has nothing to do with age. It’s never a matter of calculation either. Its fruits are free spirited. 
 
The relationships we forge with these sorts of people, ordinary, everyday people, as I say, signal for me much of what makes life worth living. They bring with them smiles and laughter, affection and regard, and from me gratitude, all of which count, I think, ultimately as holy blessings – ‘bendithion’ in Welsh. Maybe this week you might like to count the blessings you receive in this way – and maybe even say a little prayer for them.
 
Go safely, then – until the next time.
 
More Sufi Rumi from the boundary:  “Time really to get involved with love and separate completely from religion” (adapted).

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