I love that balding spot still

Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian founder of the Waldorf schools movement, wrote: “To be free is to be capable of thinking one’s own thoughts – not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one’s deepest, most original, most essential and spiritual self, one’s individuality.”

I used to have a friend, who, alas, severed ties with me and the loss still grieves me.  In the winter of 2008, he called me up and said "let's take this relationship as far as it can go". A few weeks later, he had cut off communication and refused to talk to me for several months.

During those few weeks, I experienced our interactions very intensely and I think our interactions were intense for him too. I think we were both very excited, yet both anxious for neither of us had yet had a successful, emotionally intimate relationship with a member of the opposite sex. It is my perception, grounded, obviously, in my Ego, my judgment of our interactions, my interpretations and, yes, my assumptions and projections about what might have been going on with him. He and I never related to one another. We bounced off one another. He would never spend large chunks of time with me. In seven years, we never spent a day together. Our visits were always rushed. He always had something later that day. Even when we met at 7:30 p.m. once, he announced, as he arrived, that he had to be home by 9 p.m. for a conference call. He always left a gate for his escape whenever we spent time together and he always chose the gate option. Not once did he spent one whole day being, just being, in the same energy field as me.

Anyway.

In our phone calls during the few weeks we were taking our relationship to its short and dead end, I once said "It doesn't matter what you think and feel, all that matters is what I think and feel". After he cut himself off from me, he wrote a very long letter, writing responses to some of the many emails I had sent during our few weeks of taking our relationship as far as it could go (it went about half a block?). He wrote that when he heard me say what he thought and felt didn't matter, he was fearful and believed I meant that his thoughts and feelings did not matter. He rushed away from meaningful communication, avoided the real work of forming emotional intimacy. He did not understand, not even close, what I had intended to convey.

Of course what he thought and felt mattered to me. What I had tried to convey to him is that when I am able to read my own energy, note all the data that streams at my global positioning instrument, aka my body, that I learned what I needed to know.

Imagine a telegraph system, with a message sent to one tower, then bounced to another and then another.  When I relate to someone and especially someone I love and wish to become close to, as I did with him, I receive the energy he puts out in ways analogous to my amateur description of a telegraphed message bouncing from one tower to another.  The bouncing is from him to my data reception, his energy was felt by me and my being interpreted it.

The more closely I pay attention to what goes on within me, the better I understand, sense, feel, know, another person.

I tried, a few times, to revisit my statement that it did not matter what he thought and felt, to try to better explain what I had meant, how I eperience energy. I guess the fact that he had no interest in understnading my subtle, vulnerable but very reliable ability to be me and sense others well should have tipped me off that he was not detined to be my friend. A friend would spend time with me, especially when I carefully told him, so many times, that I needed time with him.

Another conflict between us. I once remarked, while sitting in a cramped back seat of a two-seater sports car, with him in the front seat (no chivalrous inclination to give me the front seat!), my main view was the back of his head. He has a slowly balding spot back there, one I had not noticed until I sat looking at the back of his head for a couple hours in cramped quarters.  This was early on, when I still trutsed myself when I interacted with him, when I felt safe, unjustifiably as it turned out, to be myself out loud.  Wow. I was so happy in my fantasy that I could trust him and be myself with him.

I said "I love the balding spot in the back of your head."  He said nothing at the time, but later, after the weekend gathering we had been driving to, with his business partner in the other front seat driving, he wrote to accuse me of having violated a cultural norm when I commented about his bald spot. I am pretty sure that I spoe in ectasy, that I said I loved that spot with obvious joy.  I have no interest in understanding a cultural norm that would tell me to suppress a happy, joyful expression of what I felt. 

So he wrote to me and accused me, as if he had caught me doing something wrong and he was judge and jury, of violating cultural norms. What norms, I asked, for I had no idea what was wrong with voicing my joyful love of that bald spot. I am not being disingenuous here. And I wasn't disingenous back then.  I was blissed out by his balding spot. I'll never get to see it again. I can see a couple photos of him online, if I look for them, but they are all of his face, from the front. He'd never post a photo of the back of his head.

He said it was a cultural norm that made it rude to comment on signs of aging we see in others.  I am still astonished that he came up with that. I am wholly unaccustomed to having friends who give a damm about showing signs of aging. I guess he was telling me, by attacking me with criticism and judgment, instead of doing his own work, figuring out what he wanted to communicate to me and keep his comments limited to his own experience instead of telling me what I was doing wrong and tell me the rules. That norms baloney was just a way to tell me I had broken some unwritten rule.

Norms?!  Norms!  When working with groups, especially if the group will be doing intense inner work or challenging group work, I invest sometime as the group forms in establishing a few norms to ensure safety for all. But beyond a short-term container for a meeting, and a three to five day meeting is a short term limit for a group of adopted norms. But beyond a meeting or multi-day gathering, norms are figments. 

I think many people go through life believing they know the norms and the norms just happen to be how each person believes things should be, and each person magically knows that 'everyone else' honors the same norms. This is a profound illusion. Or delusion.  There is no such thing of culture-wide norms that apply to everyone in all situations.

In my networks of friends, it is playful, loving attention to compliment someone's emergent white hairs. In my set of norms, it is playful and loving to say "I love your bald spot".

I was besotted with that bald spot.

We went back and forth about his insistence that I had violated some magical norm that I was supposed to magically know about.
He never siad, for example, "I do not like it when people make comments on signs of my aging".That would not have been an accusation, that would have been grounded in his experience of our interaction and it would not have been an unjust and unkind attack, denouncing me as violating norms that I do not recognize.

Some time later, and this guy moves slower than the slowest tortoise, told me he had finally concluded that I don't recognize norms.  Bingo.  He finally got me. I worked for several years, a long while back, to release myself from cultural norms, cultural expectations, etc.  I worked so hard. But it turned out, it seems to me, that the price of having this man treat me like a friend, to love me as his friend, I would have had to give up being me. This is a man who, in what I now believe is a somewhat superficial way, admires nonconformists, even sees himself as one. Yet he expected me to conform to some undefined norms.  He thinks he is a hipster who admires nonconformists but he could not handle my loving, joyful, nonconforming to his norms but conforming to mine, comment about loving his bald spot.

I do love that bald spot. I can envision in my mind's eye as I type. Some of the lighter tones hairs around that spot, back then (its been 8+ years since I loved that spot out loud) still dance like neon lights, the skin underneath that small thinning spot in the back of his crown is radiant.  It is beautiful. I love that balding spot still. I always will.

And fuck norms.