Care

Most of the care I offer begins with making room.

I want someone to have enough space to bring forward what they have inside. I try hard to understand their position: what matters to them, what they are sensing, and how the situation feels from where they stand. I try to set aside my own values and biases so I can understand their situation through what matters to them.

Sometimes I take what I hear them leaning toward, carry it into another situation, and ask how they would respond. Their answer helps me adjust how I feel about the situation, bringing me closer to their perspective. I am learning how the world feels to them.

Care takes different shapes. Sometimes it means shelter, nourishment, patience, or repair. Sometimes it means letting consequence arrive and staying close enough that it can be carried without becoming an ending.

To care for someone is to stay in contact with what matters in them while they become someone neither of you could have planned. The tighter we hold the shape we recognize, the less room there is for the life inside it to continue becoming. Care preserves the thread that lets change remain theirs.

I have come to think care is strongest when it neither takes over nor turns away. It responds. It changes its own shape when that is what continuity asks of it. The hand loosens without letting go. The path bends without losing where it came from.

Hold what lets it continue.

Curtis