Mutuality

Last week I sat on my balcony writing about whether a relationship had reached the point where it could no longer carry what I was asking it to carry. Some relationships deepen. Some pause. Some quietly become something else. Mutuality, I thought then, might simply be the willingness to discern together what a relationship can faithfully sustain.

I still believe that.

But I have begun to think mutuality extends much further than relationships between two people.

It may be a constraint on how we write, gather, teach, host, and even earn a living.

For a long time I thought my task was to have something worth saying before gathering an audience. Now I suspect the more important task is to cultivate a way of seeing that readers can inhabit for themselves.

There is a difference.

One produces followers.

The other produces participants.

I have been noticing that the essays in the Orchard do not usually end with answers. They end with a question that is often left unstated:

And when all of this… what happens next?

Not because I am withholding a conclusion.

Because the conclusion no longer belongs to me.

The next step belongs to the reader.

Not in the Orchard.

In their own life.

That feels like an unwritten contract.

If we spend a few minutes noticing together, perhaps you will leave with a slightly different way of noticing your Tuesday afternoon, your workplace, your marriage, your walk home, your next conversation. If that happens, the essay has already exceeded itself.

The Orchard succeeds somewhere else.

I have become increasingly fond of essays that resemble a table more than an argument.

On the table this week there might be a train announcement, Christopher Alexander, a childhood memory, Carcassonne, a procurement email, and a blackbird in the rain.

The point is not that they belong together because I can explain the connection.

The point is that they have become neighbours.

Perhaps you have something that belongs on the table too.

Not another comment beneath the essay.

Something in your own life.

I like the image of Carcassonne because each tile is locally complete. It does not know the final map. It simply offers roads, fields, and a city wall that may one day meet another tile.

Perhaps essays are like that.

Perhaps lives are too.

My responsibility is not the map.

Only the next honest tile.

Yesterday, from my office overlooking the fairgrounds, I listened to a concert taking place outside. By the end of the evening I noticed something curious. The band increasingly stopped singing and let fifty thousand people carry the chorus. The cameras slowly turned away from the performers and toward the audience itself.

It occurred to me that perhaps people do not only come to concerts to see the band.

They come to discover themselves singing.

The same may be true of essays.

The writer begins in the foreground.

If things go well, the reader quietly takes their place there.

That, I think, is mutuality.

Not agreement.

Not admiration.

Not dependence.

Participation.

The old question was:

Can we imagine an us?

The newer question may be:

Does this encounter leave both of us with more ways of participating in life than before?

That has become a surprisingly practical question.

It shapes how I write.

How I end an essay.

How I hope to host a cèilidh.

How I imagine the Orchard earning its keep.

Nothing in the Orchard should make a reader less capable of their own life.

If anything, it should send them back to it.

A little more attentive.

A little more hospitable.

Perhaps with one more tile in their pocket than when they arrived.

And when all of that…

What happens next?