Natter Banter | On The Go

On talking and how are yous

A pilates buddy and I natter for about 10 minutes or so after our class. It hasn’t been that long relative to our lived years, but I can’t date back to when it first started or how, or even how it became a mutual promised routine. She walks a slightly longer route to chat with me, and I delay returning home to chat with her. It’s only short, not enough time to cover “everything”, sometimes one of us say more about our days than the other, but somehow it never feels like it, I leave feeling delighted, lighter, and mutual. The more psychology-aware speak would be that I feel seen and heard in our interaction. There is no expectation, no demand, but two people chatting briefly after a good workout, and somehow that seems to cover a lot of how I’m feeling that day and how the past week had been. It’s not a cure nor a session of therapy, but there is never an expectation for it to be so. It’s just two people talking. Somehow it’s a friendship I don’t want to quite admit how precious it is to me for I’m reminded how fleeting a life can be, how fleeting moments in our lives can be. I see the world changing around me, I see her world changing around her, and I see her make her changes in her world.

There is a sensation of a hold when we exercise. And in that hold often rests honesty, the element that allows for us to be seen and heard. I won’t share more about our natter and chatter for it is sacred as it is in a treasured friendship.

I feel that I gain another day, another chance, a reminder of hope, resilience, and mostly a sense of cheekish fun.

When we chase for “the best” of anything, be it pilates, a dentist, a restaurant and so forth I feel more and more that in spaces like that it is harder for true friendships to be founded upon. We gather in those places in the first place chasing after an ideal, an idea, a fiction of sorts that depends entirely on hierarchy and prestige and out for oneself. Situationships such as friends or companions as long as specific conditions align may happen and yes, they can be valuable too, they can be important too, but a single tectonic shift, and all is bubbles. We are there for a battle in a sense, striving and clawing for the best, a tunnel vision of sorts.