On Care and Caring, November 19, 2013

I sometimes have the audacity to try to glean meaning from personal experience.

This morning in the shower it hit me:  Write about what it means to care for someone and to receive care from others.  Where are the boundaries?  Are there boundaries?  How does one give and receive care selflessly?

First, my old-fashioned hardcover Webster’s Dictionary surprised me with its definition of care, which I had carelessly associated only with some vague notion of good-feeling, as in warmth expressed toward another.  It reads, “suffering of mind, a disquieted state of blended uncertainty, apprehension and responsibility.” The secondary definition states that to care is “to feel trouble or anxiety […] interest or concern < ~ about freedom>.”

Over the past several months, I’ve felt the universe watching, protecting.  Certainly, that sort of caring must have meant interest or concern.  Why would it be so concerned?  I had to look at my actions.  What I saw as an addiction to exploration, others saw as destructive, pure and simple.  Maybe they were a mixture of both - a fine line separating knowledge from death.  Often, I would treat that sensed caring as interference in *my* autonomous life.  For me, to care about freedom was to require complete independence, on my terms.  This is an incomplete view.

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Note:   I went to the dictionary to look up and photocopy the definition of the word “care.”  After the first copy came out of my printer, I found that I had copied the definition for the word “good.” I never copied the definition for the word “care.”  Odd.