My new friend Annette and I were getting to know one another after tai chi class last week, each of us delighted to have discovered a new conversation partner close to home. The dialogue took place over cappuccinos in a favorite neighborhood cafe.
“I love tai chi,” Annette commented between her first and second sip. “There are times when I feel the earth supporting me and the heavens caressing me. I know my body is moving, but I have merged with something so much larger than myself.”
All was well, as Annette and I floated together quietly in a cloud of ambient music. We were free to enjoy the moment. But somewhere in the background, a news announcer’s insistent voice suddenly broke through, the daily spear of spoken headlines ripping into our otherwise peaceful mood. Another school shooting. “Doesn’t life just tear you to pieces?” she sighed, the foam still fresh on her lips.
To discover a kindred spirit at our age is big stuff—although it will also mean that should we persist, we will not only have each other’s joy to share, but our sorrows. I had asked Annette to coffee because I admired the grace with which she did her tai chi. Until the news tore a hole in our mellow mood, I did not know Annette had recently lost her husband, nor that she endured chronic pain.
I have personal challenges of my own, thankfully none that cut so close to the bone, but still, there is the distance between the way I wish things are—both for myself and for the world—and what is. Through good times and bad, we humans yearn for merger with the divine. But so much of life is passed trying to manage the pieces flying at us, broken only by the occasional transcendent moment while doing tai chi or watching a particularly resplendent sunrise. We get the dishes washed. We do our taxes. We have our routines and what we consider to be “normal”—often pleasurable enough, other times dull and alienating. We persevere and hope there’s no more bad news on its way, ready to “tear you to pieces.”
Thinking about Annette’s story, I can’t help but wonder whether as long as we are alive, and things keep happening to us and the world, we may not ever achieve on-going merger with the divine? But what if this is not failure? For it is in the gap between reality and aspiration that creativity arises. In the breech is where we explore, we experiment, we practice and we build. In the gap, we are humbled, vulnerable, worn down to a nub of authenticity. In the gap, there are times, as well, when we simply endure. But even this implies some lure drawing us forward towards hope, however dimly felt.
Is the gap, then, the meaning of life, itself, where we are called to aspire to something akin to greatness? Merger with the divine: not the point of life but rather a foretaste of things to come? And in the meanwhile, life—sometimes peaceful, sometimes upsetting, sometimes tender, sometimes harsh, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes exciting, sometimes dull…And it’s enough.
Annette’s and my cups were empty, but our hearts were still full. And in the midst of it all—in the simple presence of a new friend—life was not only good—it was great.
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