One Person Close to You
There’s a poem about Sir Galahad, “knight without blemish,” that says, “His strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure.” Isn’t that nice?
I’d like to borrow the sense of that for closeness. Your strength is multiplied tenfold1 if you know that you have at least one person close to you, who cares for you, who will care for you—a relationship such that if you collapse on that person’s doorstep, he or she will haul you in and tell the cops2 that he or she never saw you, and put you to bed and feed you chicken soup, and listen to you groan, and do whatever else is necessary to get you going again.
If you have at least one person that close to you, the world is much more manageable. I’m finding that it’s quite helpful to have about a thousand of them. If one has a thousand lovers of all varieties around the world, it props one up. One puts one’s feet on the floor with a little more confidence every morning when one gets out of bed.
Harvey Jackins
From page 8 of “The Rest of Our Lives,” in The Rest of Our Lives