I love you

A friend is one who makes me better. 

It's with this highly meme-sounding quote that I'd like to start today's rambling. 

I've recently been on a long trip for a wedding and I had the chance to meet some of my friends along the way. The older I get, the more I realize how delicate our lives are. Everyone is getting older, marrying, becoming pregnant, helping a sick parent. Mortality and life become real themes, we fixate into matter, and despite what I've laboriously tried to prove, there is indeed such a thing as cause and consequence. Our lives decant, or at least yours do.

But that's not the point. Meeting my core friends always warms up my heart, especially in Berlin, which remains the town in which I feel the more rested. It probably is because the general atmosphere of the town is more reflective and critical, and life is less filtered by everyone's ambition to run towards success (🔛 this way guys).

But that's not either the point. As I was noticing how well I was feeling while my friend was explaining about her life, finding delight in the resulting opening of the heart, I began to ponder about a recurring theme > saying I love you. I had wanted to say it several times already this week, to different people. In that context, all these are people I've known for 10 years or more, so there's no need to explain - we have taken roots in each other. We can talk, and say everything that's on our mind, and let the other see us, hear us, and feel what's not expressed, what's avoided, what sounds less accurate and reveals our pains, insecurities, lack of hope and whispers of acceptance. Also, because my friends all share my favorite quality in the world, arrogance, the revelation is even more singular and elegant. 

Most of the people I know would rarely use this phrase, I love you. It's also rather unspoken, like this would be too strong, and yet to shallow to express how we feel about each other. I have been uncomfortable with it for a long time - feeling this was a rather poor and rude way to characterize something happening anyway. Of course I love you, why wouldn't I? How could I not? I remember quite vividly when I said it to partners, and how it felt, each time - so inaccurate, and yet, I knew no other words. These were moments of exposure, vulnerability, silence became thicker, palatable, a kind matter with which we could play, and what decoration could be more to the point than this? It felt like an engagement - a rare exposure. Despite the clicheness of this sentence, you feel that there is nothing to add. To say something on top of that would be like painting a rose with red paint, courtesy of Alan Watts (and also, I realize I'm always quoting the same (new age-y memesque) people, which make me contemplate the pitfalls of decay-to-come). And somehow, I also felt that the sentence was not correct.

It turns out there are so many ways to love, as a noun. 

A very rare picture of love disguised as a nun. This is what we call in the blogging business a dyslexic joke.

Part of my stubborn brain tends to think that there actually is just love, that all the rest is a well-engineered game of hide and seek, in which we play both Mr. Hide and Dr. Seek (this joke has been rated % by Percentage Magazine btw). It feels like that which emits also receives. Since these moments feel like harbors of thruthfulness in a more or less troubled navigation, they enable you to pause and wonder: where have I been all this time?

Actually, to try and pierce the appalling and self-aware lameness of this latter sentence, it is not just that. You all remember from high school the "I is another" by Rimbaud, something that made no sense to me at that time. Later, when I was randomly "looking for something earnest" (what others (like I) might call "wasting precious time looking for something that never existed and is just there"), I had to wander through the infinitely useless and important question of the self > who am I. I know, you normally give up on this after 17, but I was too busy giving up on weed to take care of both.

This is a mind map of some of the most important lexic there is to use about life. The sad thing about this joke is that the resolution is too low so you just have to trust me that it was hilarious.

It became quite clear after a while that there was no such thing as a solid self. What is is adaptable. The feeling of continuity comes also from collective reinforcement: I is a habit, personality being fixed while growing around people for several years. Reinforcement comes from both the surroundings and the self, in movements sinuous enough to be described as "elliptic" or "non-linear". I can convince myself of something untill it becomes what I put out in the world, like, for instance, that thoughts on life and bad drawings must be shared, sometimes against all evidence though. Or, I've always loved philosophy, ergo, I must become Sartre (which is rather bad luck for time flows and Sartres don't reincarnate). It wouldn't be relevant to dismiss the whole thing, to say that there is no I altogether. There are such things as personal preferences, tastes, memories, projections, thoughts, personal limits, etc. These help you see through all the occurring things, dismiss the useless, get a lover, chose the right coffee sort in the ever-growing complexity of modern life. Rather, this necessary structure is that which enables the silent wonder to bloom. Or rather 🎞🔦🌻 🌞, 🌫 (because of the ever-changing nature of things, of course).

🌊, to come back to the . , these components, or rather, the common denominator that we found for it, "I", only appears to exist. Or rather, its existence is not ontological. Or, as newbies would say, it is also performative. Try and locate it, it is nowhere. But it makes itself clear whenever you're offended, in love, or all of the occurrences of trespassed limits.

But enough about this, it was not the point. As we all know, the I functions as a frontier.

It seems that the contemporary attention span is constantly diminishing. 

And, to draw a far-fetched line on classical economics and basic cellular theory, "the frontier is both a space of exchange and a limit". A space in between. In the very case of warm moments, the thickness of this limit dissolves. We seem to enter a state of interbeing, where everything is, undetachable, which is why we love so much (or at least I do) these moments. When you're about to tell this person that you love him or her. 

It seems that interpersonal relationships can also be thought in these terms: how pervasive is the situation? How do I relate to whatever there is right now (ie people, and global settings)? Do I see it as repulsive, am I using this as a way to distinguish myself, extract my self from the situation by criticizing it, wishing something was different, analyzing it? Or is it all so wonderfully smooth and full? What choice do I have, can I establish my self in this openness, and thus inhabit the world peacefully? These of course are polarities, we mostly are somewhere inbetween, and we don't quite think about it (another form of extraction). But sometimes, the transe diminishes, doubt, analysis, projections, recollections are of no use. What needs to be done is clear - and it might be nothing at all. Or something that breaks the usual self-centeredness of life. If you like soft voices speaking about this, please find a link here to Krista Tippett's conversation with Rebecca Solnit who wrote on the aftermath of Kathrina, and how disasters are also moments where the most beautiful things emerge - calm reminders of the delicate balance of life amongst humans. If this doesn't convince you and no one in your family is Jewish, Syrian, Armenian, from Rwanda, Russia or from desolated places and traumatized families that I didn't list because now that I think about it..... 

But that isn't the point. Whenever we experience this, it feels like the frontier regains its status of a space in between. The usual I dissolves, that which is an other. When love lasts and replenishes us deeply, going back to the located self feels like a form of narrowing down. When you lie in bed with her/him, when you've reached some sort of opening, heart-breaking experience, and there's nothing else, nothing needed, no movement of the mind, everything feels vibrant and alive, it falls into place, you no longer are different from anything around. And you feel that to a certain extent, this is how things are. Not how there are supposed to be. This is how they are, and always are, the only thing is that we mostly overlook them. We keep passing by, but no one notices. This, also, is where most children live. There is no filter. There is judgement, likings, aversion, qualifications, but these occur after what is directly experienced. Reality is, hardly accessible to the needy language-based self, itself a separation from what is, and that we mostly keep losing access to it. From there on, a delicate tide can be felt, unraveling its subtle and playful correspondences. Who would interrupt this to conquer, appropriate, claim it as his own? It would feel like a statistician evaluating the price of a life, of a land, which might feel like nothing to statisticians (but to me feels rather inappropriate if not barbaric). Then of course, if your mind is that of a junkie like me, you let it marinate untill your life becomes a stew of love (or rather, a stew). Time has come for you to embark on a journey and sail towards the labyrinthine streams of the path to the deeper meaning of a truthful and authentic (if not vegan) life, while others get a job an apartment and a kid or two, and then it's too late.

Karma, dude*.

* If this conclusion has led you to despair over my ability to speak and live or other mindful concerns, please contact your nearest me and tell it about it (that's confusing).