Has someone ever touched your face unexpectedly, a soft touch that barely brushes the cheek? Or held the flat of their hand against the small of your back as you walked through a door? Or given you a gift - a card, a single rose, cookies - that was not expected or demanded? We've all had these things happen to us, and we know these tender actions feel good because they help us blunt the daily grind and keep us from becoming too realistic.
I'm often struck by how untender our lives can get. Life seems to drift toward necessity and schedule so easily, and inevitably we have to drift with it, making our accommodations in order to get through the day or the week. I sometimes imagine that our lives are like those seeds in the desert that wait for years in the dust for the brief rainstorm that will break their husks and allow them to flower. We make it through the oven heat and cracking cold by a kind of obstinacy which matures us by hardening us. We call this sclerosis "good character," and the desert's necessity "reality."
But what we really live for, what our hearts really rise to, is the rain, the tender actions that will soften necessity and free us momentarily from the grimness of "good character." When we act tenderly, we do three things. First, we are active in our daily and local precincts. The small circle of family and friends is really the only world we have, and tenderness recognizes how important they are. Second, we dampen our own individuality enough to see the complexity and texture of other people, and can, in a healthy way, be "beside ourselves." Third, acting tenderly can make us each feel less isolated and can validate those charitable impulses that, in our competitive society, often get ridiculed as weaknesses.
Tenderness is, in great part, demonstrated by physical contact: a light resting of a hand on a shoulder, a quick tousle of the hair. This is not an invitational kind of touch, but a touch of reassurance: I am here, you are there, we are connected. Tenderness is also shown through attitude, through patience and trust in good will. Of course people do things to abuse our patience and goodwill. But short of such betrayal tenderness is a way of saying that you trust before you distrust, believe before you disbelieve.
It takes an effort to be tender, and can be quite exhausting, and it won't win elections. But without it life can be full of suspicion and avoidance, full of grit and bones and the tart bruised smell of loneliness. When we act tenderly, or have tenderness given to us, we percolate with the deep irrigation of our spirits, and what flowers we are breach and thicken the air.
Men And Women
Core Curriculum