Hung out with girlfriends last night. It was a gorgeous night. It was also a bit of a desperation dinner. Girlfriends came loaded with grief and anger and disappointment. I had kind of rehearsed my misery during my glorious walk in the park yesterday. I came fully loaded, wanting wisdom, sympathy and center stage.
It didn't go quite like that. I never even got to my story. We jumped into each others pain. They unloaded. Conversation swirled around the deck under the moonlight. G. brought out Lama Marut's book and any page we opened was perfectly relevant. And we relaxed and faces changed and we hugged it out.
That's what girlfriends are for. About the melancholy...I don't mean that the evening made me melancholic, I mean that in the way temperaments behave, their pain, somehow relieved mine. I have never been a melancholic type. I am pretty choleric with some sanguine mixed in. But the different ages of life have their own temperaments. And anyone can see that as we get older, the melancholia comes to the foreground. We think about the past. We remember the past.
In Waldorf schools, we seat the children in the classroom according to the temperaments. They help each other to become more balanced by their close proximity. Many times as a teacher, I heard some choleric child say to someone just like her, "Calm down. You don't need to fight about everything." Or a sanguine student tell his neighbor to sit still for a while. In that same way, my sympathies were aroused by girlfriends struggles and my stuff didn't feel so bad.
We didn't get into solving each others problems. We didn't even try. But we were together in the tears and the laughter. Sometimes that's all it takes.
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