getting ready
For the better part of an hour, I listen to our engaged couple getting ready to go for a walk. They arrive at the moment together after lunch, having noted and discussed at length that, in the plan I had helped them create for the afternoon, a walk comes next. I hear them still processing this aloud in low tones, their words like the verbal equivalent of a tandem bike ride slowly, by way of gentle repetition, carving a ring in the grass, how this is what the list says right after lunch, right there, which is where they have arrived in the progression of things.
I sit upstairs working, a silent witness, suffering a small smile because, especially when a true risk of faith is at stake, I and my friends, my family, in Christ can talk for days about the next place God’s Spirit wants us to go. We must, in the hearing of the divine, sound much like this, importantly working our way around and around the realization of what God has planned in advance for us to do. Naturally, we belabor the point with God as well, offering repetitive prayers of submission in careful preparation for setting out.
I hear Riley say, “Well, okay, we’ve eaten our lunch, so we can check that off now, so…yeah.”
Through years of loving and training my autistic people, I have learned the power of, indeed, the comfort found, in the clear predictability of a list, as well as the world of satisfaction contained for them within the borders of a tiny checkbox, but admittedly, the fondness for plain instructions and measurable progress isn’t uniquely felt by those who have autism. We all like to know what’s ahead and what’s expected; we all feel a bit unmoored by any uncertainty, and yet, real relationships can never be completely scripted.
Downstairs, Riley emphasizes the yeah, which, to uninitiated ears, might signify some readiness to move along from talking to actually doing, but although that intention exists eventually, I know the couple hasn’t even quite gotten to the point of actually lacing up their walking shoes.
“Hey Rilo–”
I love how Josh calls her Rilo, casually using the soft, rounded nickname she kept from her childhood that somehow still feels perfect for her. They say love has a thousand intimate names, and hers, undoubtedly, is Rilo.
“— okay, next it says, ‘go for a walk.’”
“Yes, that’s what it says,” Riley brightly agrees again, evidently meandering away from the list, her voice moving, drifting. I listen to the sound of her feet lightly tapping the stairs as she ascends. Slowly, she makes her way to her room, but not, as anyone might have reasonably presumed, to get her shoes.
I hear her self-narrating, murmuring about her computer, her journal. “I think that’s everything,” she says to herself in a quiet, interior way, as she cleans up the things she had gotten out for online school that morning.
From downstairs, Josh revisits a conversation about Spring Break.
“I won’t have to log on for class next week, Rilo,” he says, raising his voice a little so that it will follow her up the stairs, as though this were a new thought, even though they’ve had this same conversation at least once a day for the last five. I imagine him standing in front of the wall calendar in the kitchen, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jacket, the present waiting offering him room to think again about the future.
I remember Eugene Petersen’s paraphrase of Romans 8 in The Message, his comment in rendering verses 24 and 25, that waiting doesn’t diminish but instead enlarges us when it carries us forward with hope, into a deeper relationship with God.
In the waiting, the unstructured, relational hinterlands, even if being here is a product of their own unhurried and careful adherence to safe routines, the couple’s love for each other grows. They learn to match pace without losing perspective on goals and responsibilities. They learn that a healthy relationship develops somewhere in the space between thoughtful plans and synergistic mobility. It takes patience and practice and unselfishness to learn to move together as one. Right now, they are doing relational things that could never be included on any list. They talk and they talk and they talk; and in all that conversation, be it prayer or planning, collaboration or the obscure verbal rehearsal of ordinary routines, whether new or repetitious, we all learn to live life together. Sometimes, not making progress is progress.
“No, you won’t have to log in next week, Josh,” Riley says now, on her way back down the stairs. “Next week is Spring Break.” I hear no impatience in her voice, no boredom, no comment at all about the circularity of their communication, and I know this is because being with Josh is the primary thing Riley wants for herself. For her, participating in the relationship far exceeds any expectation she may have about forward progress or accomplishment. They could talk about that wall in front of which he now stands, the nail from which that calendar hangs, and she’d be happy forever.
This gives me pause, as I think about how difficult such a priority comes to most of us. Many times, in my life as an intuitive activator, I have grown impatient with the slow, circular process of becoming that precedes progress in any community system. Relationship building, learning to move together, inevitably drags the pace of the impulsive and forces the reluctant into uncomfortable propulsion, which turns out to be both difficult and ultimately positive for everyone devoted to unity. I’m coming to see that maybe just maybe, that development is at least as important as the thing we all hope to do.
“I get a calendar every year,” Josh drawls downstairs, revisiting another tangential conversation, “not a custom calendar like this one, just a regular calendar, but I think next year I’ll get a planner like yours.”
He has turned to watch her mark something with her pen, keeping track as she always does, touching each task in her list for a third or fourth time, pausing once more to stroll across the room and into my downstairs office, where she hovers over my planner in search of any changes she might have missed. I have seen her do this so many times, have so often listened to her repeat and repeat the rehearsed words that go with her checking, that, in my mind, from right here where I sit at my desk, I can see and hear her doing it, and I can tell, by the traveling of Josh’s voice, that he has followed her and now stands in the doorway waiting, watching. What I hear in his voice, though, far from frustration, sounds like admiration. No, adoration. His voice, as it meanders behind her, sounds loving and kind.
“Maybe I can get better at keeping track of my stuff too,” Josh says, softly.
“Okay, looks like I’m done with that now,” I hear Riley say, soothed by the recitation.
And then again, her feet lightly tap against the stairs, this time as she walks up finally in search of her shoes.
“Hey Rilo? You keep your shoes upstairs,” Josh comments gently from down below. I can almost see his neck craning as he follows her progress up. “I have mine downstairs, but yours are up there.”
“Oh, thank you, Josh,” Riley says, the closet door clanging a little beneath the words as she pulls it open. She sounds happy, says the oh with some surprise, as though this had not occurred to her. She loves him, loves that he means to help, that wherever they’re going, whatever they’re doing, they’re moving that way together.
“I just wanted to let you know your shoes are up there,” he says again, more quietly as she returns to him, and in my mind’s eye, I see him reach for her, see him tenderly rest his hand on her shoulder as he sometimes does, as he finishes, “because I know you need them.”
“Thank you, Josh,” she says again. “Okay, now I just need to get some water. Do you need some water?”
