Yesterday’s newspaper gave me a lot to think about. In this place famine and dire poverty; in that place, war, or recovery from war, or pending conflict. Everywhere the ongoing ravages of disease, and over all the looming disaster of climate change.
In sum, the state of the world is dreadful and daunting. Then there’s the home political front, and then the home, where interactions are burdened with histories of failure and yet throb with painful and pressing urgency. Our obligations are multifarious and perplexing: what first to respond to, and in what way, and with what hope?
In this context, of what value are encounters? These occasions of our making common cause with the livingness of an other addressed as ‘you’, may not always directly provide material or moral assistance. Given the weight of the world’s woes, doesn’t that make them somewhat frivolous, if not fruitless.
Any kind of global amelioration requires massive investment in physical structures, materiel, labor. Any kind of global justice requires a deep and searching review of laws, incentives and the status quo. The world needs much more than coffee shop conversation, which comes to mind as the archetypical kind of encounter.
Why are you wasting time, Peter, with this ‘encountering’? Get to work! Donate, organize! Do!
This admonition hits me hard, because knowledge of suffering hits hard, as it should. To avoid or repress that knowledge is cowardice; it must be faced and acted on. If I’m of material or moral assistance in any way, well and good. Is it enough? Never enough. But no matter, keep at it.
Yet encountering is not incidental to such efforts but central, and here’s how.
Every encounter is an occasion of creation, that is, every encounter produces something new and good, an unprecedented potentiality. The active presence of freshness in each encounter accesses the transcendent realm unconstrained by time, space or number, but characterized by frexhos–hospitality, friendship and exploration.
Sidebar: Goodness, truth, beauty, and justice, and such are qualities emergent from freshness’s prime interest and activity–encountering–and characteristic modus operandi and style–frexhos. If we in the mundane aspire to any of these as inherently valuable, it is through the influence of freshness in encounters. End of sidebar.
This sounds formulaic but what I’m saying is that encounters do really create new potentialities, latent possibilities, for good and good ways forward. When we find ourselves at loggerheads, stalemated, exhausted by the tangle of conflicting claims, or when we cut the Gordian knot with some decisive action, which inevitably generates its own web of confusions and conflicts, we need fresh potentialities, not just new ideas, and encounters generate them (and the more the better.)
There are many kinds of encounters because there are many possible kinds of others, many possible stances of solidarity, and many possible ways we and the world can evolve, and very encounter brings into being or sculpts, in the world or in us, new latent possibilities to be realized in our next encounters or our next efforts.
The ‘work’ of the encounter then is not heavy lifting nor legislation, but the shaping of items in potentiality space, that is in the transcendent. The coffee shop conversation, or any of the other forms encounter can take, has a component of perfection and innocence which becomes a seed, a potentiality, that sooner or later, involving the original participants or others, can germinate, grow, flower and fruit.
I admire the way artists with each new creation bring into being what had not existed, nor had been needed. There’s the artist; there’s the material, fabric say; and then there’s the quilt that shocks and delights my eye as I gaze at it on the wall. It’s a wrought thing, but not a fraught thing, at least to me wandering the gallery. The image works, works in me, as I encounter it, and reflect on the encounter. The shape of it shapes me. What happens next? I rave to friends, I plan a revisit, I try my hand: who knows?
The point is that every creation precipitates a cascade. The shape of the original potentiality affects, in ways deliberate and unaccountable, the ‘downstream’ occasions of actualization that follow. So, as we feel our way forward in the making of common cause with the livingness of the other in each encounter, we are together shaping a very particular thing that in the transcendent has intrinsic and lasting value, and here in the mundane, the world of mixed blessings, is a door to what can be, and that, good.