Not to long ago I was in Portland, Oregon drinking coffee, staring over the top of a book held out in front of my face, pretending to be reading J.D. Salinger's 9 Stories, all the while watching people. This is what I saw:
A little girl slipped her tiny hand from her father's grasp and made for the coffee shop door, her blond hair spinning off the shoulders of her pink shirt, nearly brushing the now empty finger of the panicked man at the counter. He turned in mid-sentence, not finishing his order to see where his daughter had stolen away to. She was at the entrance, leaning into the door with all she was, creating an opening just big enough for her to squeeze through. Once outside she turned around and squished her face against the glass, her nose pushed into her cheek, one eye closed against the door. With a smile of mischief she looked, with one squinted eye, for her daddy's response. With a half grin and raised eyebrows, he tilted his face down and motioned with his finger for her to come back. She waited for moment, and I could see her breath on the glass, gathering and disappearing, gathering and disappearing like the tide of an ocean. She stayed there as long as she could, I think, until she could no longer stand it. Squeaking her hands down the glass she rushed back into the coffee shop, back to her father and flung her arms around his leg.
This is how it works, I think. This is how we love, by gathering and disappearing, then by gathering again and disappearing again. Like breathing, there is a rhythm to relationships. I'm finding the need to create space, to run out the door for a moment. But running out the door is hard because it requires being alone, and being alone is hard if you are not used to it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was right when he said that there is a connection between community and solitude. He said we learn how to live in community by living in solitude, and we learn how to live in solitude by living in community. Inhaling. Exhaling. Stealing away and running back. Love is rhythm.
