Finitude and Relationality

Occasionally in this space I will share anecdotes of my own life in order to reflect on a particular position I am taking up or as a point of origin for exploring something that could be done in the therapeutic process.  My recent thoughts related to vitality and vulnerability have had me thinking back on a particular moment in my life that I have reconsidered often.  It’s a moment that feels like it continues to take on newer and more vibrant meaning in my pursuit of being a better therapist, “philosopher”, and human being.

The incident in question took place about 7 or 8 years ago.  My now wife and I had been dating for some time and the fact that the relationship felt like something very long term and serious was becoming increasingly certain.  One evening, as we were sitting around, likely working on assignments from grad school and with a basketball game on in the background, the idea of marriage and what it means to commit to the possibility of spending the rest of your life with someone came up. In the context of this discussion she looked at me sincerely and, though I forget the exact wording, asked something about my sense of desire in being able to commit to her “forever”.

Of course I responded with some version of a commitment that I would, though being the good little existentialist that I thought I was at the time, I pointed out that even the idea of “forever” does have some limitations.  As I watched her contemplate her sense of shock at that response and reconsider what kind of commitment I was actually making to our relationship, I clarified that I wasn’t talking about voluntarily leaving.  Rather, I was commenting on the likelihood that, barring rare and extenuating circumstances to the contrary, in most “forever” relationships, someone inevitably departs this world before the other does.  That forever carries with it some temporal complexities secondary to the realization that we all someday will die.  No matter how little one or the other of us might want it to be the case, someone was probably leaving someone at some point to needing to learn how to manage this world in a different way.  This being sometime in 2018, I asked her if she’d ever heard the song “If We Were Vampires” by Jason Isbell.

For those unfamiliar, Isbell is an American singer-songwriter who blends certain elements of country, rock/, and Americana.  Previously a member of the Southern rock group Drive-By Truckers, substance abuse issues temporarily derailed his music career before he sobered up and became one of the more celebrated and prolific songwriters of the last decade and a half.  His work often deals with concerns related to sobriety, mental health, loneliness, the ways in which we are chased by our past decisions, rural southern identity and mythology, and death.  Which is all to say, for a cis-het white male, who maintains a somewhat literary sense of self and practices therapy from an existential lens, the guy was pretty much made in a lab to appeal to my sensibilities.  

In 2017, he released one of his more critically acclaimed albums, The Nashville Sound.  Situated in the middle of this record is a song that, with a simultaneous tenderness and surgical precision, gets to the heart of the idea that loving relationships are given meaning, at least in part, by the fact that we know from the onset they are limited by the finitude of our existence.  On the track, Isbell muses about the possibility of being immortal and how that might impact the way he and his partner (at the time vocalist and song-writer Amanda Shires, who helped pen and lent backing vocals to the track) view their own and other’s relationships.  Isbell spends the verses noting how the physical and emotional aspects of the relationship carry a secondary weight to the inevitability of the relationship having some future end date.  How most of his life is spent on distracting, though necessary, elements that take him away from squeezing every possible second out of the thing that gives his life the most meaning, before somberly singing in the chorus about the possibility that, were the relationship even to last 40 years, those 40 years will eventually come to an end and one of them will likely be left having to navigate the world without the other.

Of course, I barely repressed a smirk through all of this, being convinced at the time that this was a reflection of some important insight I possessed.  Sure, I had been moved by Isbell’s song the first time I heard it, there was an emotional and empathic register operating somewhere in there, but that inevitably bumped up against well-honed defenses of intellectualization and minimization.  My wife on the other hand steadied her computer on her lap, put in a pair of headphones, pressed play, and gently sobbed through the next 7 to 10 minutes of her life as she played the track once and then played it back again.

Now, I wish I could say at this moment the smirk washed away and I was opened up to some profound shift in meaning and my capacity to enter rich emotional experiences.  That this revealed some space inside me that commanded a sense of courage in casting off my intellectualizing armour and allowed myself the gift of being able to sit there and sob alongside her.  But that, as we know, is not how defenses work.  No.  What I do remember is feeling some sense of discomfort that I chose not to share and then being quite certain that that discomfort meant I needed to console her, because I “got it” and was inviting her into something she was struggling to grapple with.  I missed out on the strength that was actually already there.  Some years on, I now know that discomfort was not hers, but mine and—in some sense—ours.  That there can be a beauty in allowing oneself to share grief and be moved to tears by and with another person.  The most egregious part of all of this being the fact that the very thing I was professing to have some understanding of, the idea that moments in life are given meaning because life is fleeting and the richness of these moments should be cherished, appreciated, and fully entered into, was inviting me in, and I was denying and reducing it to some thought experiment through intellectual superficiality.

Death is the universal vulnerability.  There is no developmental necessity for one to be vulnerable to death.  Literally and metaphorically it’s influence reigns over so much of what we do or choose not to do in the context of day to day living.  Our relationships, ambitions, creative interests, how and what we desire, the things we choose to pursue and to leave behind, all are given shape by the temporal and finite nature of existence.  It provides the ultimate horizon on which all these involvements are determined.  We pursue various forms of relationship with the world because we will die and the meaningfulness of death is constituted by the relationships we decide to pursue.

But, I think it’s important to go back to the egregiousness of this interaction. The greatest bit of irony in all of this is found in my response to this moment.  As someone who professed to know the meaning and impact of death, one would suspect that would have moved me into a denser mode of connection in that moment and from then on.  There should have been richer and more august sense of what was happening between us in that moment.  That we were sharing in this profound vulnerability constituted in human relationship and finitude.  I would like to be able to say these were the moments I missed seven years ago that I’ve completely cleaned up, but we are who we are.  I’m certainly better at seeing them, that’s one of the benefits of taking on work that demands that you confront your own vulnerabilities on a consistent basis.  But I am still who I am.  If I’m not careful, my habitual relation to the essence of mind and body kicks on and leaves me privileging the mind at the expense of more embodied positions of relating.  But every vulnerability is a dual vulnerability, is both a vulnerability towards some action due to a conditioned resistance to being vulnerable in some other direction.  A vulnerability to intellectualize due to a fear of what it might mean to feel.  A vulnerability towards pushing people away due to a vulnerability to rejection or abandonment.  A vulnerability towards clinginess due to a vulnerability towards feelings of grief that haven’t been acknowledged and made sense of.  In the same way that finitude and relationships themself bear a relation, so to do our vulnerabilities and the manner in which we respond to an attempt to cover them over.  Interpretation is never linear.  It must be circular.  Must contain a kind of movement that is true to life.  I can now be aware when being swept up in that which I am vulnerable to and ask the simple question: “what am I missing here?”  It’s one I ask myself often and will frequently implore my clients to ask of themselves.  It’s a question that can also be said another way: “what is this moment trying to show me?”

I’m lucky these relationships, the one to my wife, to myself, and to my work, continue to evolve and contain a kind of movement themselves.  That various elements continue to be dis-covered as the pieces of these relationships move towards and away, forward and back, find new beginnings contained within their various ends.  And that each evokes, in oftentimes meaningful ways, a connection to an emotional infrastructure underneath the intellect.  That they continue to reveal.  To show me what is unseen.  To show me how I can carefully contain that which I insist on projecting elsewhere, for all of the fear of what owning it might ultimately portend.