Part One - Gareth Higgins
About three years ago, while walking across our living room at night, and in the dark, I was interrupted by a mean and raspy voice exclaiming You’re going down! Disturbed, I switched on the light and looked for an intruder, but none was to be seen. Thinking I must have imagined it, I went to bed. A few days later, it happened again - triggering a paradoxical response, on the one hand still upsetting, on the other obviously something with a less sinister explanation than someone hiding under the floorboards. Over time, the voice’s vocabulary expanded to include phrases such as I’m gonna get ya!, and I’m stronger than you! It was half-funny, half-terrifying, until the source of the voice revealed itself one afternoon, when Brian and I were watching Andrei Rublev or The Muppet Christmas Carol.
You’re going down! it gurgled, only this time we heard it clearly enough to sense it was coming from over there, by the side door, perhaps in the cupboard beneath the two fantastic old bookcases Brian had picked up for twenty bucks in a thrift store. We were right. There it was, in the cupboard, a soft toy small enough to fit in my hand, an angry looking little monster with a battery-powered voice and limited range of angry phrases, given to Brian, at a moment two decades and more ago, by a friend who thought having an angry little monster with a battery-powered voice and limited range of angry phrases might assist the process of recovery from the impact of other people’s anger and limited range of emotional self-regulation. We laughed, relieved to know the source of the voice, delighted by how the fact of the little monster’s hiding in the cupboard implied that Brian didn’t need him so much anymore. We put him back in the cupboard.
*
My friend Guy is, not to put too fine a point on it, a good guy, one of the best actually, if by “best” you mean a friend whose company you’d enjoy, whose conversation and connection is mutually supportive, and in whose friendship the common good is served.
This, apparently, is what Aristotle thought to be the ideal of friendship: a relationship in which the friends like spending time together, are of some help to each other, and whose interaction is good for the world. We’re most familiar, of course, with the idea of a friend being someone we like hanging out with; some of us have friendships that go beyond enjoyment to helping each other (and some friends help each other without particularly enjoying the company); but few, it seems, have experienced the kind of friendship that is enjoyable and mutually helpful but also makes a positive difference in the world.
Now, to be honest, I think that all human encounters can be characterized as friendship - the eye contact and kind word between the customer and the checkout operator, the smile at the person you pass on the street, the way drivers sometimes find it easier to stop in slow traffic and let another car pass first. These are, come to think of it, a kind of temporary ideal friendship - the smile is something we enjoy, the eye contact and kind word a form of help to get through a stressful day, the car maneuvers a form of ballet that, in its avoidance of further stress through helping others - not to mention a potential pile up - may be one of the quickest routes to serving the common good.
Friendship with others is inextricably linked to friendship with ourselves, and with the earth - indeed, I’ve come to believe that the ecosystem itself, from earth to sky, among people and animals and plants, is a kind of friendship. The best friends to others are those people who have befriended themselves and been befriended by the world. The best location for friendship with others is the one that honors reality - the gifts and needs, the wonder and challenge each other is facing, the quality of light in the room, whether or not there’s even a room, the dance of listening and talking and silence, the proportion of laughter and tears, the way how, in the best friendships, we slide into being made more of, of finding a brave and safe space to be more fully who we are.
*
Such friendships don’t depend on spending inordinate amounts of time together - although when they do exist time has a way of expanding and contracting at once - ten minutes can feel like hours (delightfully), months like days (wistfully). So for about six years now I’ve been meeting periodically with this guy named Guy for a cup of coffee and a conversation. It makes more of me every time. Guy is a writer and teacher, whose website describes him thus: I’m a writer, speaker, guide, coach, and consultant who focuses on the intersections of faith and life, of meaning and culture, of love and fear. I explore healing and reconciling spirituality, ethical and effective leadership, and purposeful and empowering organizations. The first time we met, he told me about what that same website describes as an ongoing struggle with an incurable, but presently manageable, illness which has forced me to come to terms with limits and the illusion of control, to seek meaningful responses to suffering and the questions it raises, and to reflect on the ethics of healthcare and end-of-life issues.
So we met in a coffee shop and I felt grateful to meet this guy Guy, who is fascinating about and fascinated with life, who takes life seriously but himself not too seriously, and wanted to meet me because someone else had said we should. All friendships end, of course; or at least they change. We drift into distance through time or as other priorities and demands emerge; when one moves to another part of the country or the world; or as a result of some unresolved conflict we decide to go our separate ways. In Belfast I once attended a funeral at which the beautiful man we were honoring was remembered by two friends: one who had had breakfast with him “every other Friday since 1984”, and the other who had the previous night driven a several hours-long roundtrip to retrieve his friend’s favorite hat so they could bury him in it. Their grief was palpable, their friendship with this man so evidently deep. And despite his death, the friendship was not over, just changed. In the vastly underrated Wonder Woman 1984, our protagonist says goodbye to her great love Steve, and the pain is so authentically embodied by Gal Gadot that it’s also painful to watch. But then, as she weeps for this loss, Diana hears his voice inside her, and finds that she can do something that had hitherto eluded her: listen to the wisdom of the beloved, and you too might be able to fly.
This might be the most eloquent and moving cinematic portrayal of what it means to experience grief as wholeness - when a loved one has died, and yet we remember what they gave us, enough to let it breathe in our being.
This learning, this integration does not have to wait until death - indeed, what some have called the life-giving properties of death awareness can emerge through reflecting on our own mortality, even if we have no conversation partner who is facing it more acutely. I used to feel terrified when thinking about my own death, or at least sad. Now I tend to be infused with a wistful sense of wanting to take today for what it is: all I have.
*
Guy and I saw each other a few weeks ago, and a few months before that, and a few months before that. I hope to see him again a few weeks from now. But a while back, we were sitting in Brian’s and my living room, on a bright day, just talking. I felt prompted to ask him about his experience with cancer, and what, after these years of facing the challenge, manageable though it may be, he was learning. In short, I wanted to know from Guy what’s it all about? And this is where he comes in.
Part Two, by Guy Sayles
The conversation Gareth and I had that day in his and Brian’s living room was able to go where it went because we had learned, over time, to trust and care for one another. When I first met Gareth, I was weary of body and heart, burning energy on chemotherapy’s side effects and on discouragement’s direct ones. The pace of my decline into a kind of depressive lethargy had sped-up while everything else about me was slowing down. I was at low ebb, but I was also curious and hopeful about what might emerge from the crucible of fatigue.
When my therapist at the cancer center suggested that I meet Gareth, I emailed him to ask if we might talk over a cup of coffee. I told him that, if he’d be willing to share it, I wanted some perspective on freelancing as a writer and speaker. He graciously agreed to meet with me. As the time neared for us to get together, I had a growing intuition that I would discover in him a friend and a fellow-pilgrim.
We met, as Gareth has said, at a local coffee shop. I was struck by the playful light in his steadily-focused eyes, the warmth of his ready smile, and the ease of his hearty laughter. I felt assured that I was with someone who feels it’s enough, gloriously enough, to be human. With his wonderful gifts for storytelling, wisdom-offering, and question-asking, he communicated an undemanding restlessness for small talk to become real talk. I have a similar restlessness, so I welcomed his deepening of our conversation. Gareth asked me something like: “When you write and speak, what is it you most want to say? What is it you see yourself doing with the rest of your life?” I scrambled for coherent answers, and the scrambling and Gareth’s listening led us into a mutual exploration of what it means to live with freedom and joy.
Since that first cup of coffee, as Gareth has said, we’ve met periodically, and our friendship has grown richer. We’ve talked about the dark luminosity of Leonard Cohen and the bright joy of Jim Henson’s Muppets; about Wendell Berry and Dr. Seuss; about the turbulence of confusing boyhoods; and about what being a man is and isn’t.
He has graced me with accounts of his labors for peace in his native Ireland; of his journey to self-acceptance made more difficult by his early experiences in churches; about films, filmmakers, and filmmaking; and of discoveries which have become wings for his imagination. I’ve learned a great deal, and continue to, from what he says, writes, and does.
To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, some of our earliest friends tend both to be like us and to like what we like. Among those we come to know later, there are often people who are something like alter-egos, different in perhaps many ways but in whom we see parts of ourselves. As I’ve come to know and love Gareth, I’ve recognized myself in him, by which I mean that our friendship has enabled me to know and love myself more fully. It is, he is, a gift.
That gift is the context for the question he asked on that bright day in his and Brian’s living room: “What’s it all about?” As I heard him, “it” meant “life.” The question registered with me as “What are you learning about life from proximity to death and about love from nearness to fear? What I said that day is mingled now with what I continue to learn about living with such questions.
From within and beyond my suffering, there has emerged a teacher. It’s not that pain itself is my teacher, and certainly not that pain was somehow “sent” to me because I needed to learn; instead, it is that curiosity about, and cooperation with, my hard experiences have helped me to discern a voice of wisdom not my own. From that voice, I’m learning that here, with all its limits and unknowns, can be a thin place, a portal of wounds and wonder that opens onto mysterious beauty. In a crucial way, now is all we ever have; now immediately becomes then and never becomes later. As many others have, I perceive that now is somehow eternal. It is the moment, as T. S. Eliot put it, in which we may “apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time.” There really is no time like the present—actually, no time other than the present. What I keep hearing from my teacher is “Be who you are and do what you are invited to do now. Live while you are yet alive.”
The name of the teacher, if I gave it one, would be Love, who connects us all inescapably and intricately to one another and relates us intimately and inseparably to sacred mystery and cosmic compassion. To call the teacher “Love” isn’t always easy, since there is pain in excess of use. This surplus of struggle sometimes tinges my trust in the presence of a tender teacher with doubt. Those doubts haven’t completely overwhelmed me, but they have come close at times. They’ve also kept me, I hope, from facile theodicies and sentimental “lessons.”
From the healing which Love is and gives, I’m learning that limits aren’t prison bars, but markers of the range of full and humble humanity. Neither is vulnerability a cause for shame, nor dependence a sign of weakness. The saving truth I keep encountering is that we all, always, need help. We all, always, rely on the generosity of both friends and strangers.
Those are my responses, as they were and as they have grown, to the question Gareth asked me that day in his and Brian’s living room. My responses were punctuated by a comically mocking and weirdly truthful voice: “You’re going down. You’re going down.” When Gareth told me the source of the voice, we broke-out into some of the most heartfelt, full-bodied, and damn near uncontrollable laughter I’d ever experienced.
To this day, alongside the voice of my teacher, I can hear that voice—“You’re going down!”—and it brings a smile to my heart. It’s true: I’m going down, but I’m going down in the company of friends like Gareth and of Love.
What a way to go.
Gareth Higgins is Co-founder of The Porch, and Guy Sayles is a writer, speaker and guide. Find Guy here: https://fromtheintersection.org/blog/
