Something about the polarity of close up and distant forms a threshold of play. Perspective and distance offer a guide to remind us that something can seem insignificant at a distance while all encompassing close up. In fact with the art of worrying, something distant can become so distorted that we can’t disengage from it. It gets psychologically sticky .Given its meaning in the scope of our life can help us realize that it didn’t matter at all. Or that it fails to represent the interesting part of our life. Some other little understanding we had that connected us to another person, although insignificant close up can begin a whole cascade of events of significance.
Duality Exercise #5: Friendship Map
Jot down the earliest friends and through whom we met them. Maybe include the location or setting. Go forwar Continue until everyone we know connects into the network. Then we can see on our map how everyone connects. Some will make double links. Some will have disappeared though without them others would probably not have entered. We have constructed a friendship map. Think about where and how this map can reside. I think in a conversation with a stranger they can quietly enter my map, so there really aren’t any strangers. See the fifth pocket blog entry.
Sometimes we have to go backwards to get the sense of the flow forward. Take any friend and trace their lineage. A line of acquaintances for Leia follows. It runs back to walking mornings from my house at sunrise in winter starting in 2004, talking to a stranger on the red road who always wore a hat, which runs back to Brad Lewis and the house back behind mine which I visited with Angus in 2003. From Angus at night bowling in Hilo back to Dwight, and back to the Kalani retreat in 1998 and then back to Max who encouraged me to attend and then back to the ticket to the Independent party where I met him in Durham in 1996, the ticket coming from my about to be ex-wife whom I met in 1981through Kate whom i met dancing in Chapel Hill in 1978 and then to Jean and Dick teaching folkdancing in Raleigh in 1970 and then Laurie and then Glenn and then Larry and Danny the summer before I started 9th grade in 1968, and their mother and my mother and my father’s job in North Carolina and my birth to my parents in southern California in 1955.
And as I notice, it is far more complicated than I would like at first and it introduces such a pleasure at seeing each event drawing support from the previous one. In fact I put down the book to write this and it is the book of which Leia spoke to me on a recent walk. So that the ideas and objects of our life are also part of these threads crossing time and space. d adding friends met because of other events in our life and whom we met through them.
Once I have this line, I can spin from it many other individuals and I have to extend sections of it to include other events that might have seemed small at the time to open into a major part of what has become my life. There could be a curious effect of tapering or dampening parts to redirect life toward other action. So now I see that there are a series of ways to find create a friendship map. And there is a curious sense of the value of the map. I wonder if anyone else would do this for everyone they remember. Would they take the time to fill in details so that the map described the life it shapes and the life by which the map is shaped?
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