I’ve been thinking about the sanctuary of sanity.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
This is not a cathedral but a friendship that began in the wake of tragedy and lives on in a conversation that has thrived for over four decades. Alongside my companion in our private sanctuary, I’ve learned that I depend most upon loving relationships that age well.
We met on a tennis court in the late 1970s. He was there because one of our foursome had died tragically a few days after our last doubles match; an aneurism suddenly exploded in John’s forty-three-year-old brain. We spent a month in mourning, then invited this younger friend to fill the space so recently inhabited by our friend with the devastating backhand. Within a few weeks, our new fourth had more than met our idiosyncratic and rather rigid stipulations for permanent partnership.
We wanted someone who could play well enough to keep our games competitive; he played at Stanford, and within weeks he lifted the quality of our play.
We needed someone who could embrace the vulgarities that erupted from the rest of us when we missed an easy volley or an overhead; he had his own ripe vocabulary and was unoffended by ours.
We needed someone who would not argue with our progressive politics; he shared the convictions we talked about between sets and at after-match breakfasts.
Since the rest of us were psychotherapists, we wanted someone who understood our work; he was a psychologist who specialized in young people and their families.
Like the three of us, he had a life-long faith that animated his soul.
We’d found our new fourth.
This doubles foursome lasted for nearly two decades until, one by one, our partners aged out. He and I played singles for another decade, until my aging back rebelled from years of pounding on the cement courts. We moved indoors to a gym, lifted weights for a while and finally wound up side-by-side on recumbent bikes. When Covid shut down the gym, we abandoned the bikes and took muffins and coffee to his office every Friday morning.
This weekly conversation is the liturgy of our relationship, and its safety and candor, acquired over decades, help keep us sane. We’ve peeled back the defenses that protected our secrets, and out of our honest conversations we’ve stitched ourselves to one another. These conversations can be as serious as prostate cancer or a torn ACL; but they’re often laced with snippets of lyrics from old rock and jazz songs, memorized as if they were our secular scripture.
He’s a better listener than I am. I’m not bad at it; he’s just exceptional. He hears what I’m saying and the muffled nuances of what I'm not, which he then entices out of me. It’s a rare experience to have a friend who is endlessly interested in you, who keeps urging, Tell me more. Talking honestly and listening carefully with insatiable curiosity: the call-and-response sacrament at the core of our conversations.
In four decades, we’ve never run out of things to talk about. In a relationship that began in sadness about our friend John, we found we could talk through our grief when my mother and his father died, and when my younger son died twenty-one years ago. I think there must be something like interpersonal super-glue that binds us more tightly when we’ve shared one another’s sorrow.
When our marriages and children were younger, we danced through the complexities and stresses of working too much while showing up for our wives and children, who thought then (and think now) that we succeeded less often than we want(ed) to believe. We celebrated together when our children married, and helped one another through the transition to having sons- and daughters-in-law. Now we talk about being grandfathers (How can we possibly be this old?), and about keeping our marriages fresh as new surprises and tensions arise after forty or fifty years.
In a few days it will be Friday again, which means the sanctuary opens at 7:45 a.m. We’ve each had our vaccines; still, Covid confines us to muffins and coffee in his office, where we’ll talk honestly and listen carefully, with the insatiable curiosity that makes these moments a sanctuary of sanity for us both.
That's just what I've been thinking - what is your sanctuary?
Blessings,
– Rick