At that moment, he experienced what he called an “extension of the senses,” an awareness that this river he was immersed in was a part of the whole North American watershed, starting with the cold little streams in snow-covered glaciers and flowing south into mighty rivers and then into oceans, and that he, too, was part of this vast flow. A thought came to him: “I was going to float.”
If you know anything about the Platte River, you know the saying that the Platte is a mile wide and an inch deep. It’s a shallow river, about knee-deep where Eiseley was. But to him, this was no trivial depth. For he did not know how to swim. A childhood near-death experience had given him a permanent fear of water, and the Platte, while shallow, does have its swirls, holes, and patches of quicksand, so the thought of floating in it came wrapped in fear, nervousness, and exhilaration.
Still, he lay on his back on the water and began to drift, savoring the sensation of it, asking, What does it feel like to be a river? He was washing away the boundaries between himself and the river he was now part of. “The sky wheeled over me. For an instant, as I bobbed into the main channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast tilted face of the continent. It was then that I felt cold needles of the alpine springs at my fingertips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward,” he wrote later. “I was streaming over ancient sea-beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time and trundling cloud-wreathed ranges into oblivion. I touched my margins with the delicacy of a crayfish’s antennae, and felt great fishes glide about their work.”
Eiseley’s essay about this experience is called “The Flow of the River.” In it, he’s not only describing the Platte; he’s describing how he felt he was merging with the river. He recounts a sort of open awareness of the connections between all creatures, all nature. He wasn’t swimming in the river. He wasn’t investigating the river. He was accompanying the river.
After the illuminating gaze, accompaniment is the next step in getting to know a person.
Ninety percent of life is just going about your business. It’s a meeting at work, a trip to the supermarket, or small talk with another parent while dropping the kids off at school. And usually there are other people around. In these normal moments of life, you’re not staring deeply into another’s eyes or unveiling profound intimacies. You’re just doing stuff together—not face-to-face but side by side. You are accompanying each other.
When you’re first getting to know someone, you don’t want to try to peer into their souls right away. It’s best to look at something together. What do you think of the weather, Taylor Swift, gardening, or the TV series The Crown? You’re not studying a person, just getting used to them. Through small talk and doing mundane stuff together your unconscious mind is moving with mine and we’re getting a sense of each other’s energy, temperament, and manner. We’re attuning with each other’s rhythms and moods and acquiring a kind of subtle, tacit knowledge about each other that is required before other kinds of knowledge can be broached. We’re becoming comfortable with each other, and comfort is no small thing. Nothing can be heard in the mind until the situation feels safe and familiar to the body.
Small talk and just casually being around someone is a vastly underappreciated stage in the process of getting to know someone. Sometimes you can learn more about a person by watching how they talk to a waiter than by asking some profound question about their philosophy of life. Even when you know someone well, I find that if you don’t talk about the little things on a regular basis, it’s hard to talk about the big things.
This chapter is about how to get to know people a bit better during the daily routines of everyday life. There are ways of showing up that deepen connection and trust, and ways that do not. If you go through life with an efficiency/optimization mindset, you’re just going to drop off your kids at nursery school in the shortest time possible and you and the other parents will be ships passing in the night. But I believe that Eiseley’s float down the river gives us a different model for how to be present with other people.
Obviously, floating down a river is not the same as being in a meeting with someone or having coffee with an acquaintance. But there is something about Eiseley’s attitude that is instructive and inspiring. Accompaniment, in this meaning, 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.
The first quality I associate with accompaniment is patience. Trust is built slowly. The person who is good at accompaniment exercises what the philosopher Simone Weil called “negative effort.” This is the ability to hold back and be aware of the other person’s timetable. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them,” Weil wrote. The person who is good at accompaniment is decelerating the pace of social life. I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” They are the sort of people you want to linger with at the table after a meal or in chairs outside by the pool, to let things flow, to let the relationship emerge. It’s a great talent—to be someone others consider lingerable.
Getting to know someone else is always going to be a vulnerable proposition. Personal truths resent approaches that are too aggressive, too intense, too impatient. People rightly guard their own psychological space and erect gates that can be passed through only in their own good time. Before a person is going to be willing to share personal stuff, they have to know that you respect their personal stuff. They have to know that you see their reserve as a form of dignity, their withholding as a sign that they respect themselves.
Accompaniment is a necessary stage in getting to know a person precisely because it is so gentle and measured. As D. H. Lawrence put it:
Whoever wants life must go softly towards life, softly as one would go towards a deer and fawn that are nestling under a tree. One gesture of violence, one violent assertion of self-will and life is gone….But with quietness, with an abandon of self-assertion and a fullness of the deep true self one can approach another human being, and know the delicate best of life, the touch.
The next quality of accompaniment is playfulness. When Eiseley was floating down that river, he wasn’t wearing his scientific hat. He was off on a lark. He was playing, enjoying an activity he found spontaneous and fun. When the hosts of retreats and workshops want the participants to get to know each other quickly, they encourage them to play together—whether by means of croquet, cards, music, charades, taking a walk, arts and crafts, or even floating down a river.
We do this because people are more fully human when they are at play. As the essayist Diane Ackerman notes in her book Deep Play, play isn’t an activity; it’s a state of mind.
For some, tennis is work. They’re locked in that achievement mentality, trying to make progress toward some proficiency goal. But for others, tennis is play—a movement that feels fun and absorbing in itself. Their whole manner is loose; they celebrate happily when they hit a good volley, cheer when their opponent does. For some, science is work—winning status and getting grants. But I know an astronomer for whom science is play. When she’s talking about black holes or distant galaxies, she sounds like an eleven-year-old bubbling over with excitement: She’s got these cool telescopes and she gets to look at cool things!
When I’m playing basketball with my friends, the quality of our game may be wanting, but we’re at play and it brings us together. We’re coordinating movements. We’re passing the ball to each other and weaving in and out, trying to get open. There’s a kind of spontaneous communication: the cheering, the high fives, the strategizing, the trash talk. I know some guys who’ve been in a monthly basketball game together for years. They may never have had a deep conversation, but they’d lay down their lives for one another, so deep are the bonds between them—bonds that were formed by play.
In the midst of play, people relax, become themselves, and connect without even trying. Laughter is not just what comes after jokes. Laughter happens when our minds come together and something unexpected happens: We feel the ping of common recognition. We laugh to celebrate our shared understanding. We see each other.
In her memoir Let’s Take the Long Way Home, the writer Gail Caldwell describes how her deep friendship with a woman named Caroline was formed. It happened during play, either rowing sculls on the Charles River in Boston or going out in the woods to train their dogs together. Gail and Caroline would spend hours working with their dogs, dissecting the different meanings the word “no” can have when spoken to a canine. “If the two of us had had our trust shaken in lousy relationships, it was being rebuilt here, with tools we hadn’t quite been aware we possessed,” she writes. “For us, dog training was a shared experience of such reward that the education was infused throughout the friendship. Much of training a dog is instinctive; it is also a complex effort of patience and observation and mutual respect.” Through the rhythms of this kind of play, Gail and Caroline passed through a series of intimacy gradients. They went from “mutual caution to inseparable ease, and so much of it now seems like a careful, even silent exchange.”
It’s amazing how much you can come to know someone, even before any deep conversations happen. When my oldest son was an infant, he woke up every morning at around four. At the time, we were living in Brussels, where it doesn’t get light in wintertime until almost nine. So I’d have four or five hours each morning in the dark to play—to bounce him on my chest, to run his wooden trains, to tickle him and laugh. One day as I was lying on the couch, holding his hands, and he was bouncing on my stomach with his shaky legs, it occurred to me that I knew him best of any person on the planet, and that of all the people on the planet, he probably knew me best, because while innocently playing with him I’d been so emotionally open and spontaneous. It also occurred to me that though we knew each other so well, we had never had a conversation, because he could not yet talk. All of our communication was through play, touch, and glance.
The third quality of accompaniment I should mention is the other-centeredness of it. Eiseley wasn’t thinking about himself or his ego in that river. He was partially losing his self and transcending his ego. He was letting the river lead.
In normal life, when you’re accompanying someone, you’re signing on to another person’s plan. We’re most familiar with the concept of accompaniment in the world of music. The pianist accompanies the singer. They are partners, making something together, but the accompanist is in the supportive role, subtly working to embellish the beauty of the song and help the singer shine. The accompanist is sensitive to what the singer is doing, begins to get a feel for the experience she is trying to create. Accompaniment is a humble way of being a helpful part of another’s journey, as they go about making their own kind of music.
The accompanist is not controlling the journey, but neither is she a passive bystander. Let me try to illustrate this delicate balance by describing a time when I screwed it up, drawn from the mundane circumstances of everyday life. My two sons both played baseball at a high level. One boy is eight years older than the other, so by the time the younger was about twelve, I’d been around youth baseball for about a decade, watching the professional coaches the league had hired to manage the older boy’s squads. My younger son’s coach on his club team that year was another dad, not a pro, and I volunteered to assist. It quickly became clear, at least to me, that I knew a lot more about coaching youth baseball than the coach, simply because I had a lot more experience around the sport.
So I began peppering him with my genius ideas about how to run practice, throw batting practice, make mid-game adjustments. Obviously, this was purely a case of selfless me being of service to the team. Obviously, it wasn’t about any latent desire to show how much I knew, or to attract attention, or to be in control. Obviously, my behavior could have had nothing to do with the male ego in the presence of competitive sports.
The coach immediately sensed that I was getting inside his zone and threatening his authority. So of course his defensive walls went up. What could have been our mutual play with the boys turned into a subtle rivalry for power. Our relationship, which could have been warm, because he was a good guy, cooled. He rarely accepted the brilliant pointers I was offering.
If I’d been better schooled back then in the art of accompaniment, I would have understood how important it is to honor another person’s ability to make choices. I hope I would have understood, as good accompanists do, that everybody is in their own spot, on their own pilgrimage, and your job is to meet them where they are, help them chart their own course. I wish I had followed some advice that is rapidly becoming an adage: Let others voluntarily evolve. I wish I had understood then that trust is built when individual differences are appreciated, when mistakes are tolerated, and when one person says, more with facial expressions than anything else, “I’ll be there when you want me. I’ll be there when the time is right.”
Accompaniment often involves a surrender of power that is beautiful to behold. A teacher could offer the answers, but he wants to walk with his students as they figure out how to solve a problem. A manager could give orders, but sometimes leadership means assisting employees as they become masters of their own task. A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think. Pope Paul VI said it wonderfully: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.”
Finally, a person who is good at accompaniment understands the art of presence. Presence is about showing up. Showing up at weddings and funerals, and especially showing up when somebody is grieving or has been laid off or has suffered some setback or humiliation. When someone is going through a hard time, you don’t need to say some wise thing; you just have to be there, with heightened awareness of what they are experiencing at that moment.
I recently read about a professor named Nancy Abernathy who was teaching first-year med students, leading a seminar on decision-making skills, when her husband, at age fifty, died of a heart attack while cross-country skiing near their Vermont home. With some difficulty, she managed to make it through the semester and carried on with her teaching. One day she mentioned to the class that she was dreading teaching the same course the next year, because each year, during one of the first sessions of the course, she asks everybody to bring in family photos so they can get to know one another. She wasn’t sure if she could share a photo of her late husband during that session without weeping.
The course ended. Summer came and went, and fall arrived and, with it, the day she dreaded. The professor entered the lecture hall, full of trepidation, and sensed something strange: The room was too full. Sitting there, along with her current class, were the second-year students, the ones who had taken her class the year before. They had come simply to lend their presence during this hard session. They knew exactly what she needed, and didn’t need to offer anything more. “This is compassion,” Abernathy later remarked. “A simple human connection between the one who suffers and one who would heal.”
When I was teaching at Yale, I had a student, Gillian Sawyer, whose father died of pancreatic cancer. Before he died, she and her father talked about the fact that he would miss her major life events—a wedding she might have someday, her children growing up. After he died, she was the bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding. The father of the bride gave a beautiful speech about his daughter’s curiosity and spirit. When it came time for the father-daughter dance, Gillian excused herself to go to the restroom and have a cry. As she emerged, she saw that all the people from her table, many of them friends from college, were standing there by the door. She gave me permission to quote from her paper describing this moment: “What I will remember forever is that no one said a word. I am still amazed at the profoundness that can echo in silence. Each person, including newer boyfriends who I knew less well, gave me a reaffirming hug in turn and headed back to their seats. No one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my grief. They were there for me, just for a moment, and it was exactly what I needed.”
In his book Consolations, the essayist and poet David Whyte observed that the ultimate touchstone of friendship “is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal 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.”
Loren Eiseley, during his float down the Platte River, models for us a way of accompaniment in the natural environment. I’ve tried to capture his attitude during that float and show how it can inspire a way of being in the social environment. Eiseley’s core point in his essay describing that event is that everything in nature is connected with everything else, and that you can understand this if you simply lie back and let that awareness wash over you. In social life, too, everybody is connected to everybody else by our shared common humanity. Sometimes we need to hitch a ride on someone else’s journey, and accompany them a part of the way.