Unrestricted Availability

Yesterday morning, I received a call from someone very close to me that opened in tears. I was working, but in the mercurial manner in which I spin myself from task to task, I decided to stay on the phone. The said person was in a situation I could not immediately or frankly ever resolve. I made a moue at the display of my futility cutting at my ego, fit for the dust. 

Yes—this was about me. In making myself available to the other, I was demarcating a destination—a point where I could travel to in her train of thought where the railway was frayed. A metal to pound upon, to fix.  Yet, my efforts were only striking to ignite the light on my own reflection in the window. Rather than travelling alongside her, I was mapping my own trip towards a fixed destination of resolution. A point of stop unbeknownst to her for my uncovering. I had shed a mere coup d'œil on her state, only to view her through the looking glass of my own vision—contained within my perspective, a narrative of eventual repair. 

In sharing the ache of another, some of us claim it as our métier to dull it or trace its source. We proud ourselves for an answer, preoccupying ourselves with ourselves, rather than listening to receive it from its source. How do we welcome others? How do we inhabit ourselves so we may become a host for another? We can be with another but not be available to them. How do we restrict our presence with the other in drawing our attention away to finding a resolution? 

On this point, author Sue Monk Kidd points to the Zen adage of undivided consciousness, in which we simply eat when we eat and sit when we sit. In that vein and in being with another in their suffering, how can we simply be with them? How can we unfurl their narrative, aside from the scribbles of our ego's own agenda? How can we fill their half-empty cup? Our contrived solution is only but honey, sweet to us in its victorious find but too viscous for another to flow through. How can we become water to water? To re-fill the cup of another in the permeability of our mere presence, undiluted by our ego? Leading a solution to nowhere but to simply being now and here.