The Particular Extravagance of Care

There is something almost unbearable about being cared for well by a partner, about coming home to find that someone has been thinking of you in your absence, that while you were out in the world, moving through its small indignities and demands, she has been making a place for you to land, filling the flat with the smell of beef slowly stewed with orange, lemon and garlic, lighting candles, arranging flowers, running a bath, transforming the ordinary business of an evening into something that feels almost impossibly tender.

It is the smell that undoes me, those deep, dark, generous aromas that seem to belong to some older understanding of what it means to be alive, of what it means to be nourished both literally and soulfully, but perhaps even more than that, it is the knowledge of all the time and thought contained within them, the onions softened slowly, the pot left to simmer, the small adjustments made along the way by someone who wants the thing to be just right. There is an intimacy in this kind of labour that I find difficult to articulate, in knowing that someone has given a portion of their day to the simple, extraordinary business of making you happy, that they have taken the ordinary materials of a life and made something beautiful from them, not for any particular occasion or because anything has been asked of them, but simply because your happiness is, in itself, reason enough.

Perhaps this is what gratitude really is: the sudden, almost painful recognition of how much of our lives is held together by the unremarked labour of other people and how much the enjoyment of being alive depends upon the hands that make things ready for us, the people who notice when we are cold, who remember what we like to eat, who make a place warm before we arrive. We are so accustomed to receiving the world as it is that we forget someone, somewhere, has often been hard at work making it kinder.

And perhaps the most difficult thing is allowing ourselves to receive it. To stand in the doorway of a life someone has so lovingly prepared for us and not immediately try to repay it, minimise it, or make ourselves less deserving of it. It is the difficulty of surrendering to such generosity by letting the bath be warm, eating the stew, breahting in the fragrance, and understanding that for once, nothing is being asked of us except that we come in, sit down and be loved. In a world that asks so much of us, isn't it so wonderful to have a pocket of safety in which nothing is asked of us at all?

I want to remember this. Not the evening (though I want to remember that too) but the feeling of it. The knowledge that someone has spent part of her day making my arrival into something worth looking forward to, that I have been considered, not as an afterthought, but as the reason for the doing.

There is a particular extravagance in this kind of care. It costs time, attention and imagination, and requires us to step outside the narrow theatre of our own needs and inhabit, for a while, the world of another person: to wonder what might delight them, what might ease them, what might make them feel at home. And then to do those things without knowing whether they will ever fully understand the tenderness contained in them.

I hope they do understand. I hope we tell them. I hope they tell us.

Because love is not only the feeling that rises in us when we look at another person. It is also the world we make around them; the small, habitable world of warm water and good food, clean sheets and open arms, of remembering and preparing and paying attention. It is the willingness to be interrupted by another person's existence and to let their joy become the day's quiet purpose.

So when I think about what it means to love someone well and to be loved well, I think I will think of this evening, and I will think of the stew, as well as the softness of the heart and the hands that made it.