What makes life meaningful?
Connection and its many inconveniences.
The moments with the greatest significance in my life have been personal. A friend comforted me after I showed up crying after I messed up a job interview that I thought was my only chance at success. Another friend I didn’t know spent all weekend with me after my worst ever breakup, making ravioli, drinking wine, and watching meaningless TV.
In the moment, I highly doubt that being with me through these difficult moments was fun for the people helping me. But the results are relationships that sustain and define us.
To love is to be inconvenienced and inconvenient.
It was embarrassing for me to go knock on my friend’s door, crying about my future. It was probably inconvenient for her to open her door and find me a sobbing mess, but she chose to let me in. That mattered.
Moments where we meet each other's needs, sit with each other in moments of pain, offer grace to the friend who is unpleasant in a time of crisis, these are the moments that matter.
So much of the good life, the life worth posting about on Instagram or discussing at dinner parties, is pleasurable and exciting, but ultimately hollow. Don’t get me wrong: I love a sweet treet, an Instagram Reel, or a trip to Thailand, but it can’t sustain me.
I can feel myself hollow out with pleasure when I’m only consuming, getting exactly what I want, and missing out on the rough and tumble life I was made for.
I need people to be inconvenient sometimes, to call me crying and pull me out of my solipsism. I need to love people who are messy and honest, people who accidentally hurt me and apologize later. I need people who let me inconvenience them too, people who notice when things are not right and refuse to let me slink away and lick my wounds in isolation. This is the meat of life.
I used to think Thoreau meant you had to experience everything when he wrote, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
But simply trying new things becomes its own kind of fatigue. Now I’m realizing Thoreau meant we need to connect to what is deepest and truest in the world. I have only ever found that in its most meaningful sense through human connection, by coming out of isolation and into life.
I’m grateful for those who have taught me what it means to be vulnerable, to take risks and connect. I’m still learning to be patient when they inconvenience me and most of all to accept that sometimes loving me is inconvenient.
Once I do, I have a feeling those connections, inconveniences and all, will be even sweeter, because they’re real.
"To love is to be inconvenienced and inconvenient." Well said. I googled this phrase and came up with a few somewhat similar phrases, but none quite this cool (IMHO). I have submitted it to The Proctor Charlie Collective for inclusion in the upcoming Cool Quotes app. It will be attributed to "Jessica Wills, Uncertain Slant: What Makes Life Meaningful?"
Love this. In high school and college I had more friendships like this (where I’d see the person at their best and worst and vice versa). As I’ve gotten older and there’s more physical distance between me and my friends I’m rarely with someone when they’re going through something rough in real time. That SEEMS like a good thing, but something has been lost. You’re definitely onto something in defining relationships by the messy parts as well as the good.