Differing

“Our destination is to stand face to face,

feeling the space around us,

feeling our own powerful and unencumbered vitality, 

so that we have some chance of not being eternally alone;

 but different enough from us 

that we can never imagine him or her to be merely a part of us.

We will discover the Other to be someone familiar and someone forever new."

                                                                                                                                                                                  • Guy Napier

“…two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.”

                                                                                                                                                    Rilke

Being different is relatively easy for me. I was thrown in the deep-end right from the beginning. I was a military brat. I used to say that “every time I was about to become somebody,a a aa we’d move.” A life that included an advanced degreWe, 30 years of psychotherapy, a stroke, an impossible initiation, disability, old age, brain damage, and a passion for elder life, pretty much insuMred that I have gotten to experience being different quite a lot. It’s kind of run-of-the-mill for me now.  But, being different presents another challenge; I am having a dramatically larger difficulty around differing.

Differing requires me to show myself, to sometimes interrupt the narrative of the moment, to be alone, to reveal complexity, to become momentarily the object of attention. It is like walking before a firing squad. One doesn’t know whether an execution is going to happen or not.

All too often some form of de-humanization does. People generally don’t take kindly to the disruption that otherness causes. Worse yet, being different usually gets blamed for any discomfort that occurs. So, living out a difference is more dangerous than passively being different. This has caused a painful conundrum in my life. One that has inhibited and strengthen me.

Differing well requires one to care for oneself. Removing the conventional mask, and revealing the more genuine is hard enough, but having to go further, and reveal the way you differ, is a courageous and necessary act. It requires love of self, diversity, and what is. This kind of move enriches relationship, and sometimes throws it into a spin. Every generous act of truth-revealing, is one that can be painful. Sometimes honest differing generates real suffering. Sometimes honest differing leads to genuine connection.

There lies the rub. Intimacy cannot really exist, without differing, without revealing what may not be acceptable. For the old person, in particular, with each day driving one deeper and deeper into uniqueness, becoming more and more different, the dilemma of differing, grows more challenging. Aging means becoming more different. So, naturally it requires more self-regard.

It is hard to muster what is needed by some circumstances. Life is full of ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’ situations. This is another one. Differing has that quality in it. It is one of Life’s many gifts, the opportunity to grow oneself, any relationship one is in, and the expansive profusion of Life. All you have to do is be as different as you are. And, be willing to experience the consequences.