When you have a hard week (hard week is of course relative) it's comforting to know people around you sympathize. They offer support and listen to your diatribes and know when it's time to try and offer solutions and when it's time to just listen and be present. They open up about troubles of their own and relate them to yours to show you you're not alone. But most of all, they offer time. I've made some demands on some people in my life recently to listen to me (and I can be quite the long-winded bore at times) and they have all, unfailingly, come through. I've made people late for other appointments I'm sure, or taken them from their homes and families (not by abduction, mind you) while they patiently wait for me to be done talking.
Those kinds of friends are ones to cherish. I'm glad I have all of you--you know of whom I speak.
But there's a whole different level to support, and fittingly, it comes from a single person in my life whom I am constantly amazed I have. My friend of about thirty-five years and my wife of over twenty-eight, Sue.
See, what she did was empathy, and when Sue does empathy, she does it all the way. I was feeling slightly miffed--a little bit irked, as it were--and she took that and ran with it to boiling rage. Where I was saying "I would have rather that hadn't have happened" she was cursing to the gods, both current and ancient. In other words, she became my knight in shining armor to my damsel in distress.
It's nice to have a knight once in a while. And I look pretty good in one of those flowing dresses, let me tell you.
My point is that it is rare in the extreme to have someone in one's life who will not only sympathize and listen and value your company and validate your problems. But it is a unique person who will make your problems her own, who will take your feelings and feel them herself. I love Sue for many, many reasons (I've been talking a lot about her in class, and I said "I don't love Sue because she is my wife: she's my wife because I love her") but right now, chief among them is how much my life is hers.
Be seeing you!
Those kinds of friends are ones to cherish. I'm glad I have all of you--you know of whom I speak.
But there's a whole different level to support, and fittingly, it comes from a single person in my life whom I am constantly amazed I have. My friend of about thirty-five years and my wife of over twenty-eight, Sue.
See, what she did was empathy, and when Sue does empathy, she does it all the way. I was feeling slightly miffed--a little bit irked, as it were--and she took that and ran with it to boiling rage. Where I was saying "I would have rather that hadn't have happened" she was cursing to the gods, both current and ancient. In other words, she became my knight in shining armor to my damsel in distress.
It's nice to have a knight once in a while. And I look pretty good in one of those flowing dresses, let me tell you.
My point is that it is rare in the extreme to have someone in one's life who will not only sympathize and listen and value your company and validate your problems. But it is a unique person who will make your problems her own, who will take your feelings and feel them herself. I love Sue for many, many reasons (I've been talking a lot about her in class, and I said "I don't love Sue because she is my wife: she's my wife because I love her") but right now, chief among them is how much my life is hers.
Be seeing you!
RSS Feed