Have you heard the one where an introvert walks into a bar? As she sits alone watching the theater of people talking, laughing, and mingling, a man sidles up next to her and asks if he can buy her a drink. She says ‘sure’ and nods to the bartender who picks up her glass and refills it. By the time he has placed the glass back down in front of her, though, it is empty. The man looks from the woman to the glass and back again. “What just happened?” he asks bewildered. The woman tilts her head in confusion and then realizes he is referencing her now-empty glass. “Oh that,” she smiles. “Social interactions just drain me quickly, that’s all.”

I know. You came here for the people, but where are they? All I can say is that I am trying. Scheduling time for an adult friendship can be surprisingly difficult. My acquaintance, Phoebe, and I have been texting back and forth for over two weeks now. In between our work schedules, our parenting responsibilities, and her travel, the options are slim, and sometimes when a single thing shifts, our plan blows up and it seems there isn’t a new potential time until a few weeks out. Stay tuned though. The people are coming.

As I wait on our lives to catch up to our meeting time, I am back to wondering if I even want more friends. More than the one closest friend I have now who lives in Canada and yes, that does mean we don’t see each other often…or hardly ever. We both have lamented the distance and feel confident that were we to be neighbors, there would be many an informal coffee or walk in our days. However, our near-daily texting, frequent emails, and sometimes phone calls seem to keep us intimately connected. There is a stability and safety in our relationship. I know that if I am feeling pummeled by the confusion and indifference of the world, I have a someone–a someone who always manages to say just what I need to hear, who helps me put things in perspective, and who knows how to let me help him. When it became quite clear a few months back that his mother was dying, I asked him what he needed and what I could offer. He responded: “Maybe compose a poem that will help me understand the new world that I will inhabit?” And thus the following poem was born:

dead end

the sign ahead says dead end and
down the hill we journey towards
the edge between a road and its limits

there must be a reason
we ignore the obvious
keep going
maybe to wait at the lip
of the ponds's waters for a frog

there must be a reason but
even those who build houses here
don't go all the way
to the end

slowing and braking
speeding and u-turning
cars thunder down the slope to get
there somewhere oh but not here

they drive even faster back away

we watch as we stand
side by side
big by little
hand in hand
breath by breath

the place we thought was the edge
from afar is instead mud
it creates a gentle suction around our feet
we do not notice until we try to move

he squats down
his bottom grazing the mud
and asks where the frogs are

we wait on their time
wondering if one might emerge
to reveal itself to us

we wait as waiting becomes
our eyes our ears our noses
as pause becomes rest

nothing happens and I feel the
fleshy chubbiness of his fingers in mine

the warm air heaves up our heavy breath
spreading in front of our blurred vision
a gray fluttering of leaves and wings
into which we soften with the world

the water remains still and we notice
the light slipping as day tiptoes backwards
in gliding sighs

maybe there are no frogs
he considers the intervals of time
transcending into glassy moist drops that almost
feel like rain

we turn to leave
we can come back tomorrow
to wait for a frog to appear

behind our muddy footsteps
beyond the edge air bubbles
ripple the water into rings surrounding
rings searching for a place to break

He lifts me up as much as he allows me to contribute what I can to his life. Mutuality, as my therapist would call it.

Introverts, it seems, socialize differently. While there has been much more openness towards introversion and introverts in the past few years, there still lingers a misunderstanding that introverts are shy, people averse, or lacking in social nuance. Rather than that awkward stereotype of us, the reality is we require more personal space as it is in this space where we recharge, where we process the complexity of the world and others, where we dive into the internal and create. Our tendency is to have only a handful of close friendships in which we often invest considerable energy, suffusing those relationships with deep meaning. And, as alluded to above with my opening joke, introverts are drained by large groups and busy sociality. Introversion and extroversion are wired into our personalities, so as Dr. Steven Schlozman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School explains: “instead of fighting your personality, work with it, and focus on the type and level of interactions you can do and enjoy.” So, yeah, three weeks in, I think I am good! Experiment complete.

Perhaps this experiment is as much about finding friends as it is about recognizing the social connections already present in my life, or the connections that have been present in the past and now have fallen into dark, echoes of the pandemic’s legacies. I think many introverts did not mind the isolation of the pandemic. I can’t speak to the lovely extended alone time I may have experienced during that time had I not been immersed in a constant 24/7 with my children, but I can say that there is something that may have been lost for me. There used to be many more people in my life. I wouldn’t call them friends exactly, but they also felt like more than acquaintances. Who were they?

When I worked at a college in Boston several years ago, I used to use at least three of my lunch breaks a week to attend the yoga classes run at the Boston Sports Club in the Prudential Center building. Over the course of months and then years, I practiced eagle pose and down dog and cat-cowed and attempted to achieve the relaxed state in savasana with the same people. Over and over. There was Reed, the interior designer, a mother of two high-school aged children, who was warm and exuberant, easy to laugh at herself and able to reassure me on the intensity and transitoriness of early motherhood struggles. There was Joanna, a beautiful lean redhead who exuded gentleness, and who I would talk to about work and relationships and then, when she appeared after a brief absence, her pregnancy. And the teachers…Alex who specialized in therapeutic yoga and whose touch was so powerful it would unfailingly release my muscles as well as my trapped emotions. I remember many of Alex’s classes ending with me sobbing noiselessly in savasana, something deep having been freed. On Wednesdays, it was Jen, all power and energy, but wrapped in a joyfulness stemming from her playful approach to life. There was teacher George, not to be confused with my mat neighbor George, whose voice was like liquid river run, whose long hair always shone with a bit of yoga-earned grease, who was a trained musician at Berklee College and tweeted about hearing music composed by Gunther Schuller, and whose presence was so quiet that he could somehow internalize you into his being where the dedication of his yogi path would mystically open and spread over the participants. And there was George, my George, an underwriter at a health insurance company, and my deep true…what? Was he my friend? We never saw each other outside of yoga classes each week, but whatever connected us was strong. Whichever of us arrived first would lay out a mat and save a space next to them for the other of us. We laughed easily about most everything. I talked about my son who he loved hearing about as, though divorced, he had no children and was not likely to. If we were on the floor in any kind of twisted pose, every face in the class aligned towards one wall, one of us would inevitably turn his or her face to the other and we would smile, sharing a secret moment. Sometimes we would purposefully stretch farther, beyond our inscribed yoga mat space, and gently tickle the other’s hand or foot. If a teacher called for a partner exercise, neither of us ever hesitated, and then there we would be, pressing our bodies close together as he flattened my arms against the wall in a shoulder stretch. When we were in our fifth or sixth or however-many-in-a-row chaturangas dictated by the teacher that day, we would look at each other in feigned fear, laughing at the exhaustion and elation of it all. He would wait for me to change after class and we would walk back to our respective places of work, chatting and cozzying until we had to part. I relished my time with him in class, and would check in on him if I passed by on my way through the center again after work when he was preparing for a run with his training partners. He lit something in me and it was a great loss when I left that job for another. A loss I had not considered or thought about at all in what I thought was my thorough assessment of the changes involved in that move…a loss that still lingers. But I didn’t just lose George when I changed jobs.

One day I showed up to class and rolled out my mat in my regular front row spot. George arrived soon thereafter. I waved to him as he took his shoes off in the hall. He grabbed two blocks and some extras for me and came and rolled out his mat in his regular spot to my left. We chatted and laughed, easily picking up from where we had left our previous conversation, as usual. Our comfort flowed, lulled the room, gave it a sweet warm music, and as others entered, we both smiled and said hi, whether they were regulars like us or newbies that we didn’t know. We wanted our little community to be open and friendly. The room filled up, and as our chatting and giggling continued, we hardly noticed that we were eeking closer to noon with no instructor in sight. Some of the class members who were not regulars started to fidget in the back. Our calm energy was cracking without the proper hand-off to our true leader. At five minutes past, we started to wonder if anyone was coming to lead the class. Sometimes there were substitutes. Joanna offered to go up to the front desk and check on the situation. When she returned, she told us that the instructor had needed to cancel last minute and they hadn’t been able to get a sub on such short notice. There would be no class. Some people started to roll up their yoga mats, return their blocks neatly to the pile, and slip back into their shoes. We listened to the gentle padding of bare feet and then soles of sneakers on carpeted hallway. Us regulars, we all stayed, seated in easy pose, waiting for some other path to show itself. “Maybe we could just hang out and do some poses?” someone suggested. Others shrugged with possibility. “Does anyone want to lead us?” someone else wondered aloud. “I could do that,” I heard a small voice announce. And then I realized it had been my voice.

Oh shit. What did I just offer? And where did that come from? I don’t know if I consciously thought those things at the time, but those seem like logical questions to me now, to the typical me, the one who does anything to avoid being the center of attention, the one who never feels quite ready enough to lead others into anything.

But the me of that moment just picked up my yoga mat and moved to the front of the room, unrolling my mat and turning to face all of the others–my friends, my community, my yoga mates…whoever they were…these people with whom I had come to feel such comfort that I could shed my own skin and attempt to grow a new one right in front of their eyes. I pieced together a beautiful flow that day. It came through me from Alex and Jen and George, moment to moment, pose to pose; even without a plan, I never wavered or hesitated. It was both soothing and challenging. When we wiggled our fingers and toes and came back out of savasana at the end of the hour, the others in the room thanked me and asked if I had ever taught before. “No never,” I answered. They were surprised and asked how I had done it. How had I come up with an entire hour of yoga class, one that not only filled the time but that they enjoyed, with no planning or fore-thought?

The answer is that I don’t know. But I was on such a high that I ran-walked back to work, the distracting world slipping happily away from me, the shared dance of our yoga class piloting me on a stream of pure euphoria. I couldn’t contain myself and, when my department head returned from her lunch, I practically shouted that I had taught yoga class that day. But it’s not what you think. It wasn’t the position of leadership, it wasn’t a high on the small amount of prestige I seemed to have gained within my community for being the most yoga-y, the closest thing to a teacher we had that day. It wasn’t a sense of self-importance. No, it wasn’t that at all. It was that I had been able to save our moment. I had been able to do my small part in order to keep the very essence of our community going that day. Like with my friend in Canada, in a moment of need, I had found my way to contribute something of value to my little community. I had filled a need. And that felt radically important.

I often wonder how we ever connect to anyone. Mostly it involves effort, desired effort yes, but effort. Making time, reminding others you are thinking of them, being wildly uncomfortable before we can finally feel at ease. In a recent episode of This American Life, one of the hosts Lilly Sullivan talks about a film, The Lives of Others. I am not familiar with the film which is about the time just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The two main characters are a Stasi officer and a playwright, with the former conducting surveillance on the latter until he becomes more intimately enmeshed in the playwright and his wife’s lives. Of the film, Sullivan says that what strikes her is

the ache, the sense of longing, and the distances there always are between people. But then there are these moments where there can be this portal of emotion from your life to someone else’s.

Lilly Sullivan, This American Life: Episode 799: The Lives of Others

In that moment when I led the class in a yoga flow, and honestly in many other moments during my time in yoga classes at the Pru, I felt that ‘portal of emotion’ from my life to others and back again. Though the relationships would be defined as informal, the connections were deep.

Earlier in the same podcast but in a separate act, one of the interviewees mentions how sometimes a gift is placed in front of you and it looks different from the reality you expected so you may not recognize it as a gift until much later. The theme of the podcast is to explore how some people seem to live in the minds of others without their knowledge. As I think about my yoga community and others like it in my life, I consider that space we give to and inhabit in others’ minds as the gift placed in our lives, unrecognizably so perhaps, or even one to which we remain completely blind until that mental space we used to fill and refill begins to run dry.

As I thought about connections that used to be in my life and now no longer are, another strange community came to mind. My gym friends. I know, again, they are not really my friends, but they are what would more officially be called weak ties. That phrase doesn’t really feel right, though. Before the pandemic, I went to the same gym on and off for over two decades. Because of my frequency and the intensity of my workouts, the trainers took note of me and what started as a comment here and there on what I was doing developed into conversations about things far beyond the weights and the exercises. They were excited when I became pregnant with my first child and worried if they didn’t see me for a stretch. When the wife of one of the trainers became pregnant a few years after I had had my first, he often peppered me with questions and then asked for advice once his twins were born. This trainer once developed an in-depth weight-lifting program for me completely for free and not at all as an inducement to get me to hire him. At one point I dated one of the other trainers which meant I did now see some of them outside of our designated ‘weak tie zone.’ Similar to my yoga people, my gym people felt home-like to me. In both of these environments, you became known by what you were doing rather than having to sit down and answer a million questions attempting to explain yourself. They could quickly see that I was a dedicated weight-lifter, that I put an intensity into the workouts they admired, that I almost never missed a workout, and that I adhered to the unofficial rules of the community such as wiping down benches, putting away weights, and not hogging machines. You could do worse than to learn about someone through intimate observation. This sense of being known without justification or explanation may contribute to the strength of these mini-communities. In an article titled “The Strength of Weak Ties,” sociologist Mark Granovetter defines the strength of an interpersonal tie as being dependent on:

the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.

Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), p. 1361.

Reading this definition helped illuminate why my ‘weak ties’ feel tighter than many of the friendships in my life. Though we did not spend a lot of time together, the emotional intensity, intimacy, and reciprocity were, dare I say, profound.

Here is the thing about weak ties…if you buy the weak tie theory. Turns out they are more influential in areas like exposure to new information and opportunities than other interpersonal connections as well as commonly being more heterogeneous than strong ties. Level up the weak ties with some of the emotional depth I described earlier and this very well may be why my life right now feels a bit duller, flatter, and more cramped. While my weak ties never delivered me new employment opportunities (although I did get introduced to a partner and together we wrote a yet-as-unpublished children’s book), they colored my life with varied perspectives, differing life backgrounds and experiences, new insights, and a kind of love that is as real as any romantic relationship. Other recent studies have revealed how those with more weak ties appear to be happier overall and to experience a stronger sense of belonging. Maybe there is a better model somewhere in here for DEIB initiatives.

Armed with these new insights, I am considering how to incorporate more weak ties back into my life. These people that I barely know may well be the gifts I never saw until I found I too had nowhere to place my gifts at the feet of others. My yoga practice now may be more advanced, there may be more lightness in my poses, but there is decidedly less in my being. Edith Wharton once wrote:

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

Edith Wharton,”Vesalius in Zante,” 1902

The gift of weak ties may lie in the mirrors they hold up to each other and ourselves. And in that glittering space of light, we spread.