Life's Great Experiences

A favorite writer of mine recently tweeted, "Few of life's great experiences are frictionless." This is one of those statements that I would have easily agreed with before our present ordeal. Great experiences in my life--marriage, children, work achievements, skills acquired, etc.--all required a massive amount of friction. (Insert joke about friction and procreation here.) We understand this. Good things don't come easy.

But I'm beginning to see that the reverse of this statement is true as well. High friction experiences are (or at least can be) life's greatest ones. I don't mean this in an Oprah-"what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" sort of way. I mean that confronting the pain, frustration, exhaustion in our situation, not to mention dealing with the potential loss of our child, has allowed us (no, forced us) to draw on and materially act out the depths of our love and commitment for each other.

You might say, "We all shouldn't need such events to act out our love and commitment for each other." I'm not so sure. To go back to the military metaphors I mentioned a couple of days ago, this is like saying that soldiers should be able to act out valor somewhere other than the battlefield. And no doubt, this would be preferable! But it is also impossible, for valor is not simply courage, it is courage in the face of danger. Valor requires friction.

Does love also require friction? I now do not believe it is possible to love deeply (or feel deeply loved) without high-friction experiences. In the words of Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. But unlike Benatar's vision of young lovers clashing with each other, true, deep love in battle is between soldiers. The friction, then, of our great experience is the battle we are fighting alongside SB against cancer. And while I would do anything--I mean anything--to take this away from him, I am so grateful for this experience. It is giving each of us the rare opportunity to love and fight and persevere when the stakes are highest.