Shared

I realized yesterday that I miss having a shared thing.

As long as I can remember, I have had a shared thing, something that I worked on or did with someone else in which both were actively involved in the event towards something else.  Playing outdoors, role playing, band, drama, The Firm (and its 52 predecessors), worship team, teaching - for well over 35 years I have had activities in my life that have been shared with at least one other person (or in some cases, 100).

But surely you have activities, you may ask?  You seem to be busy.  And I am.  I have many things that I do - and that I enjoy doing.  The difficulty is that they are projects that are essentially individual in nature.  Even those that I do in a group - Iaijutsu, Highland Athletics - are performed in the context of an individual. And the others - cheese or mead or writing - are all completely within the context of one person - me - doing the activity.

Why does this matter?  Because having a shared activity means that one has someone to share the activity with - the interests, the growth, the doing of it.  One has someone to bounce information and knowledge off of, someone who can directly appreciate the failures and successes that one meets.  A shared activity means the drudgery becomes a little lighter and the victories become a little lighter.

But most of all it means a shared soul - that in at least on aspect of one's life, one gets to share a sliver of someone else's soul, their inner most being.  Because true love of a subject and sharing it is really the act of opening up one's inner self - one's deepest interests and desires - to someone else.  When we truly share an activity with another, we can let our guards down in a way that is both intimate and enchanting.

Not so with regular life, of course.  Too often regular life becomes a series of events in which we bounce off others like marbles in a bag, each of our lives impacting another as we chase our own goals, sometimes almost immune to the impact that we have on others and too busy in what we are doing and pursuing to move beyond our hard outer shell.  It is only in sharing activities with others, having a project or goal or unifying theme outside of ourselves, that hardness of our outer selves can soften.

And this is what I have realized I am missing.