being a be-er

 

I've compared myself to my lifelong friend, G, a lot over the years.  Our lives look so different from each other.  These days my comparisons highlight the different ways we do daily life. Which is to say, she is do-er and

Me & G, on my 50th birthday

I'm really not.  She does stuff - like expanding and advancing her career, volunteering with the regional PTA, events and getaways with extended family, transporting her sons to and from their scheduled activities, and the little stuff like board games and library runs and festive cookie-making extravaganzas with friends and relatives.   

I'm a be-er.  I've tried stretching into a do-er but it always exhausts me, leaves me disoriented, ragged, and uncomfortable.  In my middle age (I'm 50, now!) I'm practicing self-acceptance, working my strengths, and owning my orientation to relationships and homemaking and one's interior life. From that seat in my comfort zone I'm still looking out into our local communities - our town, my son's school - for places where I can bring something beneficial and do something useful.  

I think activity is a priority in our society.  I think doing stuff is valued more than contemplation, patience, intimate connections, and rest.  It's a contrast that makes me feel like an outsider.  It takes a lot of effort for me to imagine, identify, and then go do something out in the world.  I am quickly overwhelmed and exhausted by diversions from my routines and interactions with new people. I envy G's ability to do so much.  It's as if she is having an impact out there while I am - what? what is worthwhile? - still in here. 

I know it's a false dichotomy.  G isn't some live action hero in the middle of things and I'm not a hermit meditating at the margin of society.  I trust that life is better for everyone when we value and include both of these orientations in how we be and do humanness - in our communities, families, friendships... in our ways of engaging with social change... in our ways of embodying who and how we each are as individuals.  

It's a shift in perspective to recognize that G and I complement, rather than contrast, each other.  That complement contributes to the longevity and vitality of our friendship.  We exchange stories of our different ways of experiencing life and our particular points of view.  We support each other's breadth and depth with new connections - she stirs the parts of me that would go out to do something and maybe I stir the parts of her that feel deeply.  Together, we make a secure place where the resonance of our decades-long familiarity includes the occasional off-note of invitation to do or be something else, too.