Really Recent Rumination

Time for a bit of a breather in my religous exploration to talk about friends.

Is there an emotional point where people in all their manifestations become exhausting? If there is such a point, then perhaps I've found it. Even those whom I love -- and have loved for a long time -- are difficult to bear. No, more precisely, relationships in all their manifestations and incarnations are becoming an irritatant if not outright a source of anxiety. Lately, they seem to exact an emotional cost beyond that which I feel the fortitiude to bear.

There are myriad possible explanations... the stress of the holiday season... changes people are undergoing personally and professionally... the distance from my family... but none of them are the reason. Those reasons are eternal, like paying taxes or the sun. Examining this time in my life, what's different, truly different?

I am alone, literally and figuratively.

I've spent the last three years coming to terms that none of us really can count on what it is that we have from others. Marriages end, or people die, move, or separate... things change. I have so many friends who spend this season with their families... some may think that this season is time for them to enjoy the spoils of their efforts for family all year long... well, maybe I was some kind of inadvertent architect of my divorce, and I definitely pulled the plug in relationships since then; thus, I'm alone. I've built nothing for this feather-nesting time, they may think, so I should "enjoy" it, my aloneness while they wrap themselves in the comforting quilt of family. I made this bed, after all, and I must lie in it alone.

But rather than envy their families and their collaborative holidays, rather than wishing I had one of my own, or at the very least a snowstorm of invitations because "Your'e just like family to us," I can't help but realize, beyond their traditions and exclusions during this holiday as they may apply, they are alone, too. All of us are. While my aloneness may be more literal this Christmas, the truth is that none of us are forever for any of the rest of us. This may be my season to go it alone. Someday, some Christmas, they may find themselves in different circumstances than they find for themselves this year... circumstances which might serve to build within them less of an all-encompassing yet limiting celebration of the life of family and one that embraces all whom they love, and all for whom they are grateful, all year long.

My enlightment of the true isolation of our humanity does connect to God, who cannot let us down. People are fallible, but God is not. God is all around, and even in our moments of aloneness, he connects each of us to him and one another. Looking for people to serve the needs within our souls is a fallacious approach to fulfillment; in our own limitations, biases, proclivities, and exclusions, we are far from open-hearted and selfless enough to bear eternally the needs of our fellow men and women.

My failure during this time of Christmas is my neglect to forgive myself and my friends for our collective humanity. I need to forgive myself for taking personally the things they do that bother me, whether they've done them intentionally or unintentionally. I need to communicate my feelings instead of using my generally overdeveloped skill of cutting people off when they fall too far short of my expectations. I need to go beyond the fallibility of our collective humanity to appreciate the essential joy that my loved ones bring to my life.

Maybe, that way, I can bear our relationships during this difficult and anxiety-provoking holiday time.

It's a scary position to feel that relationships, all of them, are becoming more trouble than I want to make for them.