Doing One Thing

A couple of years ago, I was walking around DC and stumbled into an Apple Store mid-day. The shop was completely empty, but the Genius Bar was preparing to teach a class on basic Mac photo editing. I was stunned to find the Genius employee fire up a projector and proceed to teach the class with no students present. If a class is taught, but no one is around to take it, was it taught?

It's been a month since I wrote my last blog post, which has been the longest break I've taken since I promised to write once a week. I've been thinking a lot about how the discipline of the schedule has forced me to write more than I've written in years. This is the same discipline, albeit in corporate form, that drives an Apple Store Employee to stand in front of an empty store and ask nobody whether or not they had iPhoto installed.

My friend and I have been co-running Forefront Church's BIPOC Small Group for the last three years. In that time, regular attendees have become close friends of mine. There's very little we share in common. Many of us grew up in different parts of the world. Each one of us has a wildly different idea of how we'd like to spend our free time. However, what matters is that we show up to small group over and over again.

There's this idea that people are inclined to become friends purely through shared traits or characteristics. In this framework, what we have in-common drives a relationship. However, to be honest, I think that framework doesn't hold water in my own life. I think, honestly, people become friends through sustained exposure. We're all commitment-phobes, but it is precisely commitment that builds mutual attachment and trust. I think our attendance in small group is the primary driver of our uncommon friendship. We do one thing over, and over again, until we're friends.

My friend wrote about doing things ten times. The discipline of doing something over and over again can be expressed as follows: "if you want to take something seriously, commit to doing it ten times". I would echo that sentiment. Life got in the way of my discipline of blogging recently, while I've been moving houses and taking Maximum New York's Foundations of New York City class. However, because I've already blogged twelve times this year, I've found it easy to return to this discipline, despite having been away from it for a month.

The relationship anarchists around me have been really fighting against the idea of a relationship escalator. Why must dating lead to marriage and kids and a mortgage? I turn it around. Why can't we approach every friendship with the same intentionality that we approach dating? The assumption on a first date is that you're evaluating whether someone could be a good candidate for a second date, and vice versa. Dating is the one relationship in our lives where we accept the discipline of doing things over and over again to build intimacy.

To that end, living life with discipline is just choosing what is worth doing over and over again. I crave novelty, but the most rewarding moments in life come from the returns on the mundane. Writing this blog makes me a better writer, even if some days it feels like I'm an Apple Store Employee, telling an empty room to open up their invisible laptops.

Lately:

• I've been a student in Maximum New York's Foundations of New York. It's been a wild ride and deepened my relationship with the city. Much of my spare time has been spent deep in those readings. I'll write some more about the class another day.
• I'm starting to plan for my sermon in a month for Pride Sunday at Forefront Church. I've been working my way through Jose Esteban Muñoz' Cruising Utopia.