My first post was an easy one: bird calls. The experience has glamour written all over it. Something to remark about on the phone or over the dining room table. Likewise, the book, the opera, and so on. The ballet in the second act of Armida just carried me away both times I watched it. Transport is a giveaway of encounter. But what about my wife, or this website, or the Ward 18 committee, or the woman at Social Security.
Of course in these cases, there’s business to transact, things to clarify and settle, and none of the fascination that shouts ‘encounter.’ Yet clearly the other party is an other, compliant on this matter and contrarian on that, and with an individual readiness for freshness.
Living 40+ years with a person gives lots of opportunity for encountering. She’s a shore person, and I’m an uplander. She’s a cabin person and I’m a tenter. She likes to settle and I like to go. Our negotiations are kinds of encounter in which each of us seeks not just to get most of what we want, nor even just to make sure the other gets most of what they want, but appreciating each other, ourselves, and us, as we are, as we can be.
Sometimes we can’t be bothered to be fully present to each other in such parlayings, sometimes also we’re at loggerheads. So encounters have different engagement and comfort levels. But sometimes, and this is what makes the word freshness so appropriate, we find unexpected resolutions and new ways to be the couple we are. We discover afresh the point of our being together.
The point. Encounters are where we find the point of doing we do, having what we have, being who we are.
Our encounter with the Covid19 has changed the circumstances of our lives into something unfamiliar and disorienting. Day by day, we’ve had to ask new questions about the point of what we were so assiduously at pre-virus.
The recent protests following the death of George Floyd lead us to ask about the real point of policing.
Indeed, what is the point, we ask, of thinking of ourselves as even belonging to a nation, if we or others suffer systemic racism, or if the very lives of the vulnerable are discounted in favor of that abstraction ‘the economy.’
More deeply than this, there is the common cause to be made, even just in us, with the livingness of those who are struggling to breath in hospital ICUs and their appalled and grieving family members, and with the anguish and anger of black people at the complacent ignorance of white people, at the injuries inflicted and being inflicted on their very souls.
Encountering is not just serendipity, but being present to others with all the risks and rewards inherent in that stance. It involves a readiness, a going-forth or allowing in, a reflection. Beyond our basic motives and agendas, encountering is the way the freshness we so need enters our closed, self-justifying worlds, so we see the visions and dream the dreams we need.