training for the emotional olympics

This might be a transition in TLR.

A former acquaintance, who was never a friend, once remarked to me that talking to me was 'like training for the emotional olympics".  When he said that, I choked down the comment, suppressing my strong impulse to reply that interacting with him was also, for me, like intense training for the emotional Olympics.

I wonder now, and only in passing, how things might have unfolded between us if I had shared what I thought when he said that.

I often asked this man to spend more time with me. He only saw me very intermittently, never for more than an hour or two. He never allowed us enough time to get to know one another, to get past the introductory phase of truly knowing another being. And I think he projected all responsibility for our failure onto me, blaming me. At least I was willing to try.

As the Hendricks say in their book "Conscious Loving", when two people decide to get closer, there is always a stage in which things get hard, even a little scary. Consciously loving persons hang on for the rough transition, the fearful transition, from acquaintance to friend, trusting that the instinctive call they feel to get closer to a specific someone will carry them through.

In Chicago, there was a grocery store when I was a teenager that had no actual doors. No doors in Chicago, where it gets pretty cold in winter, was amazing. The store was not near where I lived or hung out but friends and I trekked to that store to see its amazing doors.  Instead of doors, intense blowers blew hot air across the open doorways to keep out the cold. It was interesting to walk, for a moment or two, through that blowing heat to get in and again to get out.

Entering a consciously loving friendship, instead of a social acquaintanceship that is mostly shallow and founded on ever-shifting social norms and, often, also founded on an agreement to avoid one another's shadows, is like going through the heat blast of those open doors on a cold Chicago night. The transition need not be long but if one does not consciously move through the intense, 'like training for the emotional Olympics' and remain engaged with the other as consciously as possible, one cannot ever get close.

And maybe the man I have alluded to made a conscious decision that he would never get close to me.  I don't know what was going on with him.

I know what the Hendricks say. They say every relationship reaches a stage at which two people decide to go forward together, even into the scary shadow work that people must do to become close, or they agree to have a relatively shallow, social bond that may appear to be close but which is not.

Any relationship, in order to become a close one, has to transition through the hard stuff. Anyone who thinks they can get close to someone with no shadow work and no scary emotional stages is afraid of discovering who they really are.

Relationships are where we discover who we are. Meditation also reveals aspects of who we are but until one allows one's ego and shadow to bump, in trust and love, with another person, one cannot know one's self fully.

This man I mentioned was never my friend. He began telling me fairly early into our seven years of emotional Olympics that he did not trust me. Yet trust is an essential element of friendship. Aristotle wrote that trust is an essential element of friendship -- good enough for me. Aristotle also wrote that friends spend time together solely because they like being around the other person and not for shared activity, that friends spend time together because they like and want to spend time with the other. This man never trusted me and never seemed to feel any real desire to send any meaningful time with me.

Past is prologue.  I hope.

Imagine training for the actual Olympics without trusting your coach and/or teammates. A nightmare.  Trust is essential to any healthy relationship. And if someone distrusts me, that distrust is about the other person, not about me. I am trustworthy.  Sure I am imperfect, become angry, offload feelings when triggered. I can't, not yet, escape my human imperfections. Yet I am trustworthy.

I believe this relationship felt like 'training for the emotional olmpics' because of fear and distrust, and because of our respective, absolutely futile effort to escape our destiny to do some work together.