Friction Feels Good

The other night I found myself out in the dark and the rain, on the banks of a river in the English countryside, trying to improvise a tiny tent before the bulk of the storm rolled in from the west. I was stripped to my undies to keep my clothes from getting wet, my hands shaking as I tied the top of my cloak to an overhanging alder branch and plunged stakes deep into the carpet of stinging nettles that surrounded me. My knuckles were tingling and the scent of some crushed herb floated up from the ground. For just a moment I wondered why I was out here doing this, and then I remembered: I was rubbing up against the world, getting into contact with it, touching it and feeling it touch me back. I was learning to be more intimate with reality.

See, a little more than a month ago, I received a very valuable piece of wisdom from a guy named Jeremy, and its true worth has been creeping up on me slowly. I’m sure I still haven’t fully incorporated it yet, but I’d like to share it with you while it’s fresh on my mind. I met Jeremy at the European Microsolidarity camp this summer; he’s a stout guy with bushy hair and beard and a big voice and a big personality. He dresses colorfully and his manner is larger-than-life, almost comedic, so it would be all too easy to write off some of the things he says as unserious. But this one thing he said has stuck with me and I think it’s an important message. He said it not to me, but to a friend of mine, and it went something like this: “I kinda wanna be a dick and tell you to put on your big girl pants. You’ve gotta rub up against the boundaries. I mean friction feels good, right?”

Later he gave me a little more context for the idea. We navigate the world between the twin chasms of checking out and acting out. The temptation to fall into either one is strong. Checking out is the allure of retreating into myself, letting things happen however they will, trying to have nothing to do with it. The thinking goes: it’s not my problem, there’s nothing I can do. Acting out is the allure of imposing my will on the world, regardless of the resistance to it, maybe lashing out with a sharp word or impulsively breaking a rule to remind myself of my own power. The thinking goes: who cares what other people think, I can do what I want.

In between these two chasms is the more nebulous and challenging space where we negotiate the nature of our togetherness. We acknowledge each other’s boundaries and make contact with them, touching, pushing gently a little, but with no intention either to shrink away or to break through. The fact that I move into that space with you and touch the boundary between us says that I care and want to be close, and the fact that I don’t try to break through it says that you might be able to trust me. The friction feels good.¹

This space can be found in all kinds of interaction, like words and voice and body language, but being a very tactile person, I find the metaphor of physical touch appealing, and there are some areas where it seems to not even be a metaphor. One simple application I’ve found is in stretching. When something in my body is tight or painful, I find that repeatedly moving to engage just the very edge of the stiffness or pain is far more effective than pushing deep into it and trying to force it to release. Playing with the friction of this edge does indeed feel good, and I can feel how my body begins to trust my mind more, and releases the tension generously, knowing I’m not trying to force it or trick it into anything.

I also notice this idea in how the physical world feels to the touch, in how many of the surfaces in our modern built environment are hard and unyielding. If I press on a wall or a piece of pavement, it presses back exactly as hard, no more and no less, seemingly fixed and unmoving,² as if my presence doesn’t matter. But in nature, nearly everything yields and presses back: the blades of grass and the living soil, bending branches, the wind and the flowing water. Some beings are clearly alert and responding to my presence, like the birds chiffing their alarm calls overhead and the small foraging creatures diving for cover in the bushes. Some beings make their own presence known forcefully, like the rattlesnake, the blackberry cane, or the stinging nettle. To be immersed in such a world is to be reminded constantly that I am embodied, present, and alive.

At times, the friction of the world can feel uncomfortable, the scratches and stings intolerable, and I long to retreat to the dryness, the quiet, the smooth and harmless surfaces of a private room. But I notice that I mostly feel this way when I’m sick in body or spirit, when my strength is at a low ebb and feels like it won’t be enough to face the world. Sometimes resting in comfort is just what I need, but too much of it and I find I risk falling into the temptation to “check out” and not engage with a living reality that touches me back. When I remind myself that friction feels good, I can go out into the world and lean in more fully to the experience of being alive. In this state of mind, I find that to be immersed in a rich field of responsiveness, whether it’s a rainy field or the reverberation of a cathedral³ or a conversation partner who follows me closely⁴, is more deeply satisfying than checking out or acting out can ever be. Let us reach out, let us make contact, let us stay in touch.

snail climbing a fruiting stem of dock in Avebury, Wiltshire, England

1. Is this about sex? Well yes, that’s absolutely one of the applications, and I’ll leave you to work out the fairly obvious parallels for yourself.

2. If you’ve studied materials science you’ll know that all surfaces do in fact move when pressed, and one way to perceive this is to put a mirror on a wall and bounce a laser pointer off it at a shallow angle; you’ll notice the beam deflecting slightly when you lean against the wall. But movements this small are all but imperceptible to the body, and I think that’s important because the body is where our intuitively felt sense of reality comes from.

3. The acoustics of cathedrals may have been designed to create an aesthetic sense that we are tiny beings within a vast universe: on the one hand the felt sense of space tells us we’re small, but on the other hand we can hear ourselves as located in a specific place within the vastness, so we’re also present and significant. Our every cough and footfall ripples out and returns to us magnified and mysterious. This is a good overview of the connection between religious aesthetics and acoustic spaces.

4. Sasha Chapin does a great job of describing the appeal of being responded to in “What the humans like is responsiveness.”