the present of presence
I visited my family over the holidays. I love spending time with them but it also exhausts me. Not because they are exhausting. Quite the opposite, they are actually pretty good and pretty chill people, loving and enjoyable to be around. What creates exhaustion is the pressure and expectation I put on myself. I feel when I am there, I need to be fully there. I want to be present and available at all times, physically, emotionally, mentally. As someone who needs a lot of solitude and introvert-time, these contradicting forces get me in trouble eventually and shit is sure to hit the fence.
I consider attention as one of the greatest gifts you can give a person.
To be fully present with mind and matter, soul and spirit is a tremendous act of care.
Or is it?
I am very conscious of where my energy goes and who or what demands my attention. Attentive energy isn’t boundless. It is a limited resource and as with any limited resource you need to be careful where it goes because it will be missing somewhere else and you need to be okay with that trade. When I am with people I care about I give attention and presence generously. As I said, I consider it one of the greatest gifts you can give a person and I like giving gifts. (I am shitty at many things in life but one of the things I am really fucking good at is gifting gifts. I am known to be the best maker of birthdays - if you ever get to spend your’s with me know you are in for a treat).
As with many things we do for others we are probably likely doing them for ourselves.
It is a good feeling to make others happy. It lifts us up. But there’s more to it: directing people’s emotions and lifting spirits like a puppeteer to states of palpable bliss is power.
We tend to talk about power in negative contexts mostly. How power is used to intimidate, instill fear, control, and terrorize; abuse of power. The German word for power, Macht, is exclusively dark and dangerous; something to be wary of. But power is neither good nor bad. Power is the ability to create change. That is all. And few things are more powerful than changing someone’s emotional state for the better.
All things have two sides though and what is bad can be good in a different scenario and vice versa, what is good can potentially be bad.
People have different energies and personalities and emotional dispositions and how they translate into the social world, (duh). Every so often I meet a person who is cut from the same cloth as me. They too consider presence and attention as gifts and are givers who give it all. It’s intense. Two people who are so open and there with the other person that it becomes one big explosion of outward attention. At first it's very exciting and intense but it gets exhausting quickly. I feel it in my body. I get wired, like after three cups of strong coffee and my breathing becomes shallow and I need to force myself to take a few deep breaths to calm the fuck down. It’s ridiculous.
Over the years as a companion, I have noticed that I seem to get along particularly well with people on the autism spectrum. I haven’t given it much thought until recently after spending an evening with a girl who had just moved in next door. We had some tea and talked and were baffled how much alike we were, from appearance to personality and emotional setup. She was dating a man on the autism spectrum who she said was the exact opposite to her in almost every way. The evening went into the night and the next morning I woke up with a massive hangover but not the alcoholic kind. More like an emotional hangover. There was a sense we got too intimate too quickly. The depth and privacy of things we talked about felt disproportionate to our level of acquaintance. I like going deep but it felt involuntary. Neither of us had boundaries. Both of us highly empathetic, engaging, and present there were no distancing regulations in place. There was no back and forth, just forth. No Ying and Yang just Ying. It got me thinking about the relationships I have with people on the spectrum. How our respective emotional setups complement each other. I bring intimacy, they bring distance. They bring directness, I bring empathy. I give them closeness, they give me space. While they find comfort in zooming in, I find peace in zooming out.
I learn so much from that dynamic. That giving someone your full attention is a gift, yes. But that loosening the emotional grip and being present with yourself instead also is. It allows the other person to do the same. It gives them space to just hang out with themselves for a moment. Which is maybe the other greatest gift you can give a person.