The world is full of people who will accept us at our worst and most ridiculous. People who, by ignoring us or coddling offer their implicit approval of our lamest actions. This is not always a bad thing because we all do silly and often stupid things (some of us on a minute by minute basis) however each of us needs at least one person in our lives who will, from time to time, look directly into our eyes and say – “stop being so foolish”.
These people are hard to find because they need to be someone close…close enough that their brashness does not drive us away. We grow fat on the sugar of yes-men and yes-women in our lives to the point of emotional diabetes and so that someone who tells us when we are being morons needs the weight of deep relationship behind them or else their words bear no more force than the cold and distant grand-parent of our youth who would look disapprovingly upon us once and a while and offer a quick comment like “you should not dress like that” to which we respond “yes grandma” and quickly forget the words and go on our happy way.
The people who deign to hold us accountable cannot be private knights of virtue who ride in from unknown parts in all their glory to shine the light of correctness upon us and then ride off to another hapless soul. These well-meaning individuals are simply foot soldiers of arrogance. What is required is relationship. A depth of relationship that allows the harshest of words to be spoken like frigid but necessarily water poured on the head of a drunk.
We may scream at them when they speak into our lives, we may even shut them out for a time, but the depth of the relationship is directly related to the weight of their words upon us and over time their voice may become the only thing we hear in our hearts and we are invariably drawn back to them because they are friend.
It takes courage to be a friend. It takes compassion, forgiveness, long-suffering and in return we give the same. As we are spoken to so to do we speak for over the course of a relationship we come to understand that our friend is not perfect (far from it) and that they do not speak with the authority of truth in our lives but rather they speak with the authority of love and in doing so give us permission to do the same for them.
We all need at least one person in our lives who refuses to enable our own stupidity. That binary star to whom we are forever linked by the gravity of relationship and fraternal love. The one who may at times be distant but who’s pull, light and warmth we feel from afar reminding us of their presence and their words. In them we spiral up while the world would pull us down.
Harnessing Chaos 