Making room

Less than a week ago, after visiting the Downtown Sangha, I wrote here about wanting more friends.  Tonight I visited the UU Sangha, and during our dharma discussion one of the members talked about her neighbor – a lady who is clearly very lonely but who makes no room in her life into which any new friends could possibly wedge themselves.  She's always very busy with this or that urgent task, and she doesn't have an ear for social graces (so if you invite her for dinner, say, she'll come at the wrong time).  And this means that her continued loneliness is in large part her own doing.

 

Is this me too?

 

Maybe.  I've got different segments in my life, but – as Debbie pointed out – I don't integrate them very well and I'm not even sure how to integrate them.

• Work: There are probably two people that I feel really relaxed and friendly around.  One of them is a woman who works for me, so I probably have to be careful not to let fraternization go too far.  The oither is another manager in another department … he and I like to get together and bullshit a lot, and we've talked about getting together for dinner but it has never happened.  He did actually invite me to Thanksgiving Dinner, but I had plans (as I wrote about here).
• UU Sangha: There are a couple people here that could be friends – well, I think of one in particular that I really like.  But I'm not sure how to make the leap out of the sangha-context and into general friendship.
• Downtown Sangha: Same story, except I know the people less well.  There are more of them (it is a significantly bigger group) and I go there less regularly.
• Museum: There's a local museum of popular art that I frequent … again, same story.  I'd love to make friends with the associate director, for instance, and whenever I'm there I try to talk with her at length about whatever their current exhibit is.  Whenever she sees me, her eyes light up … I'm sure I'm not making this up.  So how do I take the next step?
• Volunteer work: You know I volunteer every Saturday evening.  Could I make friends with the staff there?  Actually as it turns out there's one other volunteer on Saturday evenings, a young woman I'll call Suzie.  Suzie lives over near where I do; so since I walk to the site every Saturday, now she does too and we walk home together talking.  She's Wiccan, though not quite the same variety Wife used to be.  But it has given us something to talk about, and we have talked quite a lot for people who have only seen each other once a week for the last two months. 

 

Fine, so I'm making friends with Suzie.  But Fate really had to push her at me in a way that I almost couldn't avoid.  I'd like to make friends with some of these other people too, but I'm really not sure how.

 

On the other hand, now that the topic has been turned back to me so directly, I'm going to have to think about precisely this question of making more space in my life for other people ….