Day 75
collaboration
One of the most exciting developments of my middle-life is the ability to exercise the art of collaboration. I have tried and failed at it many times, including a marriage and a couple business ventures. Collaboration takes more than just the desire to work with someone, a good idea, or even complimentary skills. Good collaborations are built on the foundations of good relationship and solid disciplines.
When Kari invited me, and herself, to collaborate for 100 days on this project, I hesitated only because Kari knows me so well that her invitation was a lightly veiled challenge. I don’t believe she necessarily saw it this way, but close friends have a way of encouraging you by demanding that you actually step into yourself. The lovely part is that collaborators step in to themselves alongside of you, and so a project becomes an exercise in mutual self-awareness and growth.
I am also stepping into collaboration with my parents and my sister (with whom I live in a sort of life-long collaboration) and find that I am less skeptical than I thought I would be and more hopeful. My only explanation for this is that I am learning to trust that even a bad collaboration teaches us something.
There’s a lot of talk and teaching these days about interconnectedness and the need to find each other and develop communities in order to enact social justice, create a prime local for spiritual growth, etc. Community is just another word for collaboration. Community is built and fortified by large and small collaborations fed by common experience, vision or mission.
I think it is interesting, and lovely, to enter into a phase of life where, having lived alongside someone for twenty years or more, you begin to look at each other not just as companions or “friends,” but as people you can work with. That person next to you, anticipating your moves, knows just when to hand you a tool, and you trust them enough to take it. Log by log, word by word, line by line, you create something. It is not what you are creating that is important, so much as that you are doing it together. There is such joy, such anticipation. It is like returning to childhood, a box of blocks between you, playing…yes, in the best moments it is exactly like play, and we all need a bit more of that these days.
