Remember Ten?

When you're young, and on the threshold of a journey, rashness is all. - One of my favorite quotes but I will need to look up the author.

Day 73. Short blog tonight, which is regrettable because I've been kind of on a roll. Not that my ego is invested in this or anything . . .

Today was quite remarkable. I saw a friend with whom I have not been in touch for 30 years. That's right -- thirty years! We were kindred spirits, soul mates, comrades without arms from the time we were about ten or eleven until we lost touch early in college. Wild rascals, we were. Our memories include a ritual of making brownies at 3:00 a.m. and then sneaking out to go toilet paper the homes of junior high football players. We almost got sent home from church camp one year. How marvelous - who gets sent home from Church Camp?! I'm pretty sure that was the same year we added concentrated dish soap to the fountain at the Methodist college which was conveniently located a few blocks from her home. And concentrated it was - the soap bubbles spilled up and over the fountain walls and coated the entire square outside the student union with a thick, snowy layer of suds. Good times.

I read somewhere in the psychological literature that we are most purely who we are at around the age of ten. I suppose that's early enough that we haven't been ravaged by adolescent angst, but have a decade under our belt during which we've formed a personality. I love 10-year-olds. They are some of the most genuine folks I know. My friend and I must have met at the peak of ripeness for our true nature. I knew after two e-mails (which was the extent of our contact before meeting tonight), that we would still be deep and true friends. And we were.

Even after thirty years had added many chapters to the narratives of our lives, we remained eerily similar. Tastes in books, music, and political direction matched. Ideas about marriage and children (both on the outer perimeters of normalcy in the state of Oklahoma) were congruous. We shared significant memories with one another, each filling in missing pieces for the other. At one point in the evening, she leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Sheer joy." I understood implicitly. At our age, happiness and contentment well up intermittently, but "sheer joy" is a rare and precious thing.

I'm convinced we pick well when we are ten. There is a lot that hasn't yet happened to taint the essence of our being, so we naturally gravitate to what fits. I'm grateful that my Buddha nature found hers. So grateful, in fact, that I'm headed for my cushion to offer a proper thank you.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc