Fragile relations

I saw the two of them up ahead and promptly ducked into the next lane to detour far and wide around them. 

So it goes with people sometimes, don’t you find? They were perfect at one time in your life and then, at some other time, they no longer are. For whatever reason — sometimes we know full well why, sometimes it’s a mystery to us.

If we’re lucky, over the course of our life we collect a core of ‘chosen family’ friends around us, who remain with us as cheerleaders and challengers through thick and thin, good and bad, easy and tough times. If, along the way, we lose a few, due to the quirks of personality or warts of hurtful shortcomings (on one or both sides), then I think that makes us normal fallible humans. Certainly I am that. 

I am still learning the complicated lesson of accepting no more than my share of the blame, of letting go (with both hands) when there is clearly no appetite for rapprochement, and of having the generosity of spirit to meet head-on those with whom I have fallen out of favour rather than turning away. 

I’ve had disagreements with political colleagues that have resulted in significant ruptures of relationships. Some of them I’ve been able to more or less mend because the importance of the issue, for me, outranked my feelings of personal animosity, but some ruptures remain to this day despite my efforts to the contrary. In politics, I expect such things, but a similar rent on the personal level is, for me, a different kettle of emotional fish — harder to handle, harder to shake. It feels more hurtful, more painful when it’s personal; there is nothing so big as politics to make it bearable. 

That I continue to struggle with this is embarrassingly evident from the detour I took the other day. I wonder what I’ll do next time...

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo by Josue Michel on Unsplash