A Longwinded Toast

I'm having this extended, extended, e-mail conversation with a friend of mine who is away in a foreign land. And we talk, by virtue of where we are in our lives, both physically space-wise (different continents) and otherwise, about the full range of things. The small sights he sees, the random thoughts I have but also the momentous things that happen to either of us that insert themselves into the course of the correspondence and thus must be acknowledged. It feels like a consistent thematic approach to life, first by distilling it to the bits worth corresponding about but then also by thinking in the spirit of this strand of extended conversation which has, not surprisingly, developed its own themes. Things like one’s place in the world, one’s emotional landscape, who you used to be versus who you become, and lately we’ve been on this trip about how you grow and why you grow. Or not. All of that further framed by the constrains or better parameters of this being someone I did not know a year ago. It’s a very cool sort of journey for all these reasons. But anyway--

So in connecting a book he was reading, a classic in fact, with my recent “watershed” moment of Sept 5, he brought to my attention how the book was full of this consideration for one’s intentions of growth, of development, of expansion of self. And it dealt with it in many ways including through insistingly using the word “dilate”: so people, mainly the heroine, either experience or consider dilation, in face of thoughts and experiences. So he put the word to me, the questions we entertained being around whether this is an apt metaphor for much of what’s obsessing us these days, when we correspond. And it is. This is about that, for me, this whole journey is about a sort of pre-cognizant internal visceral aspiration (and aspiration is a word that means breathing in all my other languages more than in english, and when you in portuguese aspire you dilate your lungs by filling them up with air)—so aspiration to a more expansive soul, a greater life, a greater place in the world or contribution to it (in the small sense of having a purposeful existence that fill you up, not in some sense of fame and fortune). And so many of my stories that I have told myself can be laced up under one rubric: how have I been made or remade bigger or smaller, how have I dilated or contracted, at the hands of significant people and events in my life.

He also pointed out that in my big moment the other day the conversation was directed or projected onto X but was really one I was having with myself. As my friend put it, it was an instance of me “calling myself out”, as much as anything else. And so I got to thinking about the motor that pushes one to do that when one had not done it before. In my case, not in almost ten years. What then makes the dilation possible? Triggers it? I like the idea that we are capable of dilation, of growth, of becoming “more” than we were, from being fundamentally unstable or rather, unsettled organisms. This is as close to a central truth I hold as any. It's an overarching theme for me that growth and information and meaning worth finding always occurs, or at least, arises, from the instabilities of the landscape, be it theoretical, be it verbal, be it emotional, be it your relationship, be it your soul, be it whatever story you're telling yourself. I don't want to become one of those people who theorize some bullshit about scarcity and disaray being the mother of progress and invention innovation, etc; I resist that generally when it is presented as pertains social interactions, the conditions in which people live. Adversity builds character—that’s simplistic and it’s bullshit. Dysfunction only builds, well, dysfunction. But intellectually and emotionally yes, I think what makes you capable of reaching past what you thought was the limit is a fundamental conception (albeit one that can fade almost out of sight if you make it so) that limits are fictional, that more can happen, or rather, that you can make more happen inside yourself. So for me a lot of the satisfaction with my conversation with X was through this return to this my central conviction, which is that I need not necessarily settle for what is presently at hand. That I need not understand any given moment as given or as final. That I can go my extra miles.

It's weird--I used to feel such pains in trying to get to certain emotional "clarities" or emotionals breakthroughs that I thought I was "really owed" a proper response from the person I was going there for or with. Say if I went there in a conversation with X and made myself vulnerable, I would be putting everything on the line in that exchange, and he had better return in kind. This was my M.O. certainly—to be vulnerable almost as an offensive, becoming the emotional equivalent of someone who throws themselves off a cliff to test whether the loved one will reach out and catch them. And if they don’t, if they didn’t, I would be devastated beyond reason and belief. The other day I did no such a thing, my vulnerability was to myself and the rectifying, the proper response expected—that I would not fall to my knees and weep and wail and despair—I expected it from me. Of course X did not give me anything in return but it was not about him anymore. I would love to say because it would make my experience the proof of something I trust is true, that if I had not gone through these horrible years and this particularly horrible last couple of year, I would still know what I know. I would still have grown this extra bit. Dilation would have come. I suppose that’s probable but I have never known it to be true.

Here’s wishing for the one who will come test my boundaries in a more seductive way, tug at them subtly rather that relentlessly tear them down, somewhat gently—certainly creatively—nudge a bit of growth out of me, in a sort of give and take thing that feels good, as opposed to kicks my ass from harsh truth to harsher outcome. Here’s to what I’ll find room for now that I I’ve dilated much.