Accompaniment
Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples’ affairs.
– prayer of an anonymous abbess
I tend to struggle with judgment. I find it easy to form hasty assessments of others, to come to personal conclusions about whether they are living or thinking rightly, and if I care about them, how they could be doing that better. In fact, the more I care about someone, the stronger my impulse to control their growth in some way, to barrel ahead with advice, to grow disappointed if they aren’t changing.
I’ve spent years parsing apart this tendency and the mixture of upbringing, personality, and life experiences that have bred it; I recall praying more than once, God, help me not to judge so easily. And then I got cancer, which blasted apart this notion that any of us can see or control or know what is best for ourselves, much less anyone else. It tore apart the secret, fundamental assumption that A leads to B; that if I do C, then D will happen. It showed me what it’s like to not look like how you feel. To have something most people cannot see or appreciate affect what you are able to do and how you do it.
And I’ve found that, unless I am specifically asking for it, what I want from others is not really advice. It’s not lectures on cancer-cure diets or experimental studies. What I want is someone not to tell me what to do but to listen to what I am going through. Someone who simply says, “I am here,” and then who shows up and keeps showing up, not just in the flush of the drama of a new diagnosis, but for the long road after.
What I want is accompaniment. Witness. Someone who is there not to control, but to come alongside. And yes, I do value their advice when offered, all the more so because I know they are giving me freedom to consider it at my own pace and in my own way. It’s like what Pope Paul VI said: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.”
““We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.””
What does it mean to accompany someone well? David Brooks writes about this in his book How To Know A Person. Accompanying someone involves a series of skills, like starting by looking at something else together rather than looking too deeply at each other, sharing a common experience or engaging in small talk that gives you a sense of the other person’s temperament and manner. It involves patience, what Simone Weil calls “negative effort”: the ability to “hold back and be aware of the other person’s timetable,” decelerating the pace of life and being “lingerable.” It involves being playful in a way that builds friendship and trust. It involves being present: showing up without necessarily having to say anything at all.
“Accompaniment,” Brooks writes, “is an other-centered way of moving through life. When you’re accompanying someone, you’re in a state of relaxed awareness—attentive and sensitive and unhurried. You’re not leading or directing the other person. You’re just riding alongside as they experience the ebbs and flows of daily life. You’re there to be of help, a faithful presence, open to whatever may come. Your movements are marked not by willfulness but by willingness—you’re willing to let the relationship deepen or not deepen, without forcing it either way. You are acting in a way that lets other people be perfectly themselves.”
This is not unlike musical accompaniment. These days, the only time I practice piano seriously is when one of our kids needs an accompanist for a recital; the pieces have gotten hard enough that I can’t just sightread the part. I have to work at it, but not for the usual reasons. As an accompanist, when I don’t practice, I can’t join in. When I’m good, I make my presence known. But when I’m great, I’m invisible. When I’m great, what the audience remembers is not me at all but how the soloist came into their own.
Accompaniment is something we all have to practice. Judgment comes naturally: it is easy to make a conclusion about someone else based on our own point of view and experiences. It is much harder to move through the world in an other-centered way. Much harder not to assert control on one hand, or become a passive bystander on the other, but to actively engage without condition. To listen before speaking, care without controlling, hope for and walk with while honoring the other’s ability to choose. But done well, it is one of the most meaningful ways we connect with another person. It is the essence of friendship, whose ultimate touchstone is, as David Whyte writes, not improvement but “witness, the privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
The morning of my fourth infusion, our nine-year-old daughter woke up early to help me pack. She made sure I had a bag of snacks, the frozen gloves and booties, a bottle of water. I was leaving before she had to leave for school, so she walked me out to the car. I don’t recall if she said anything the entire time, but later, lying in the chemo chair, I remembered that image of her waving from the garage: she knew I dreaded these days, and her way of telling me she knew was to show up in her quiet way. I thought about all the people in my life who have walked beside me, who have given me freedom to be myself while caring deeply about my growth and well-being, and I thought: what a gift to be given that in my life. What a gift it is to be that for someone else, for an hour or a lifetime.
