It seems like I have all this success recently. Essentially everything that I try genuinely in my professional life works out. Most things are easy. I don’t even work super long hours. It just all comes my way, without having to put in so much effort. I guess that’s what they call privilege. Or talent. Or whatever. Having lost my best friend to addiction and childhood abuse 4 months ago, and having lost love to addiction and childhood abuse 5 months ago makes these things pale. And definitely grounds me. What’s striving worth when we can have the perfect moments here and now?
With Connor, I regularly used to watch “Notting Hill”. Maybe, it was because we famously didn’t really manage to get there. We had a cumulative IQ between us beyond what would be considered safe to drive even on a German autobahn. (It’s a joke; there’s no speed limit but still physical limits to what’s safe to drive.) And yet, we weren’t able to figure out the London Underground. A humbling experience. And a reminder that it’s the heart, not the mind, that matters in the interaction with one another.
We’ve always had love inside of us that could warm whole cities, and wean them off fossil fuels in a heartbeat. We would go to hell and back for those who were close to us. It’s also made us vulnerable to losing those we cared so deeply about. Connor, sadly, never managed to get past the death of his dad to alcohol at age 13, of his friend Pedro to a motorbike accident at age 19, and of Roel to a sudden heart attack at age 29 (while riding the porcelain throne — which might well be the most blissful way to pass; it literally just takes a heart beat and urologists say that regular prostate stimulation is the best thing that a man 50+ can do). I now understand a bit more what he must’ve been going through. Grief is tough.
With Connor’s passing, many of my thoughts remain with the UK. They had a really rough time recently. Politically, it’d been going downhill for more than a decade. And yet, the British remain some of the warmest and kindest people that I’ve come across. This is especially true for the Scottish, like Connor was one (albeit with a toffee accent). You may not understand what they say but they always welcome you with open arms, and share a dram with you. Really the ideal place to live as an alcoholic.
I recently picked up this quote from somewhere: choose those that you let close wisely, but if you let them there, then fully commit yourself to the cause. Radical commitment. It certainly was how Connor and I lived.
I knew he had his issues but we also had the best chemistry. Oddly, as I mentioned before, he managed to overcome many of those issues during his depression, at least insofar as they pertained to friendship. I’m proud that I played a small part of holding him to account and helping him become an ever better version of himself — yet, without ever wishing that he was different to begin with. In the last few months, I even started substantially supporting him and his treament financially. What was mine I considered his, too.
In Christianity, you get told that you need to surrender yourself to God. Many other religions preach the same thing. Kind of ironic in the competition for that true monotheistic God. Historically, much of this has been about geopolitics, power, and manipulation of people. Religion, in this sense, is disgusting. We shouldn’t have to surrender ourselves to Hamas, Vladimir Putin, Trumpism, or whatever other cult is currently en vogue.
And yet, there was some truth to what religion has known for centuries. Surrending/committing yourself to someone is the highest act of love. I don’t mean this in a co-dependent and draining sense but in a mutually reinforcing one. If it’s toxic and it hurts, it’s not love. (I’ve learned that lesson.) Rather like Dr. House and Wilson. Ying and Yang.
Love for what’s around us may be the religion we actually need for this century. We often don’t treat each other well. We’re wrecking our atmosphere. And biodiversity, too. If we actually appreciated our sorroundings and surrended ourselves to them, we would not have ended up in this. But maybe, too, I’m just a hopeless romantic.
As a nerdy sidenote, a similar concept has been advocated in the academic scholarship on how companies should compete with each other. In the book “Competition Overdose”, Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi argue that companies should strive for noble competition where companies try their best for their competitors to suceed.
As an even nerdier sidenote, Martin Luther King was one of the first ones to argue for this concept. It’s puzzling how humanity keeps coming back to the same moral principles, just to forget about them again in living our hectic but very important day-to-day lives.