Attunement

Sometimes when Andy and I are working together in the kitchen, I can point toward the counter and he will automatically hand me the next piece I need for whatever it is I'm working on, never breaking in the conversation between us.  Other times, we have had entire conversations in sleepy, morning grunts.  Sometimes, we are planning something out for the house and entirely on the same wavelength, making the same cognitive jumps and building off of one another's ideas to make a wonderfully cohesive plan.

And other times I have to ask four times what "it" is in the sentence.  Or we find out fifteen frustrated minutes later that there was a misunderstanding about the timeline of what we were discussing, which was resulting in a much more barbed conversation than expected.  Or the response to the question included a heavy sigh because there was an implied secondary task with the first that hadn't actually been implied but was somehow there all the same.



It happens.  That synchronicity ebbs and flows.  Some days we're remarkably attuned to the others' needs.  Other days we feel disconnected, needing to find where the roadblock is but knowing that this is going to take some emotional energy that we might not have at the moment.  And to add insult to injury, we're frustrated that we're out of attunement already, not even starting on the whatever the core issue is.

It's okay to let ourselves feel that way, to mourn the moments of disconnect.  It hurts.  When both of us are ready to, we can find walk along the riverbank to find where it's blocked.  We can find that space to meet in the middle again.  We can realign.  It takes time and energy, but it restores communication, that instead of a trickle we're an efficient flow that makes all else smoother.  It takes intentionality.  

I've been thinking about this in some different ways during the pandemic.  A whole year under these new uncertainties.  I think about friendships that I long to reconnect; I chastise myself for not always having the emotional energy to act on bettering them now.  I'm grateful for persons who have reached out to me; I'm grateful to those that have responded when I can reach out.  I take time to find a middle and how far I am able to stretch at a given moment.  I wonder at what attunement needs repair that I haven't even realized.  

And I marvel at the group of persons that I have cultivated into my life, both those that will transition out and those that will stay.