For The Good Ones
I’m farewelling a friend this week. I shared time with this friend only peripherally, but it doesn’t matter how much someone made you laugh, does it? It doesn’t matter how many times they grinned at you with their whole face or briefly placed a hand on your arm. Social connections are the entire basis of our survival as a species. Public Service Announcement: treasure the good ones.
We’ve all met bad ones. The office bullies. The charismatic showpony who sneaks all the credit and burns all the bridges. The thoughtless. The cruel. Some of them run the world. Sometimes, it’s difficult to measure the impact of those looming, malignant figures against the easy breeze of a person whose life is driven by connection and generosity and patience and love.
It seems particularly unfair that, say, a lazy, ignorant, rich, entitled, hectoring buffoon with the world’s media filming his every move should be allowed to continue sapping the joy from the universe, while the kind, the humble, and the downright delightful leave behind not much more than an impression of themselves in the sheets of an empty bed. They come to us in song lyrics. They pass us in the street, briefly occupying the gait of an unfamiliar stranger. We love them and so many people love them and now we are left with the loving but without the force that drove us to do so.
It has been said before that it’s a shame we save the most profound and loving words for when someone is gone. To some extent this is the nature of loss. But we do celebrate people while they’re here. If it’s too embarrassing to say so, maybe we are slightly sideways about it. Someone once left a colourful cactus with a ribbon around it on my front door. There was a card on which was my name inside a hand-drawn love heart. I don’t know who did this, and I have no intention of finding out. Presumably, said person found themselves one cactus up and thought of me. Now, back to the rich and powerful buffoon: who brings him a surprise love-cactus?
Someone called Meredith runs a shop near me. I see Meredith more regularly than I see most of my friends. She knows the names of the people in my family. She knows who eats what, and who enjoyed the stew she taught me how to make when I had too many capsicums. She is welcoming and lovely and funny and yes that is her job. But it’s also Meredith. I bet Meredith is in lots of people’s lives. A household name. A local celebrity. A friend. There was another shop down the road once and the bloke was nice enough, but he was no Meredith. Celebrate your Merediths!
There’s a parent in one of the groups of parents I stand next to sometimes who asked me a question recently that went a tiny bit deeper than the surface level smalltalk we usually engage in. I answered him honestly, in what could have been a “too much information” moment. We were standing adjacent, watching the kids, and he turned to me, and he looked at me with concern in his eyes and he said, “oh, man” with such sympathy for my small domestic predicament that it caught in my throat. It was tiny. Again, it was the kind of things humans just do instinctively. Not worthy of note in particular. But then you think of the giant buffoon and you think: little things like this should trump (ahem) big showy acts of aggression and exclusion.
Point is, they do. My friend, the one we are all somehow celebrating for all the wrong reasons this week, was called Alyssha. She was funny and relaxed and kind and quick to laugh. She made things feel better. As buffoons crumbled to rubble around you, Alisha made you the most interesting person in the room. It would be so great to be one of her favourite people. She was so obviously gifted at being a person who connected and listened and laughed the most rewarding laugh, right up into the universe. Out into the stars. She laughed upwards and sideways and with all of herself, without being domineering, but in a way that reminded us of each other.
When the buffoons are gone, there’ll be more buffoons. But the people who loved Alyssha? The people who love Meredith and the random Dad at the parent evening? Those people are lucky, and we know it.