I am not a young man and so it’s a relief, midway along the journey of my life, to find I am mostly not lost in the dark forest.
I can do my job. I have helped raise children I am proud of. I know how to hold a knife and fork.
I am, at a basic level, socially adequate.
Last Saturday night, though, I had to do something for which I was sorely unprepared; that is to say, perform an online gig in aid of a small, but amazing charity, with the band I played in in the distant days of the 1980s.
Now this involved remembering a lot of things I had forgotten, exercising skills I had long neglected, and doing it all in public, on behalf of people who were relying on me.
It was an anxiety dream made real; and the fact is that when I am anxious, I am not, despite my hard-won, social adequacy, unflappable.
I am capable of extreme flapping.
And Saturday might have been designed specifically to flap me.
I was nervous and exposed and substantially flapped.
And then, as the moment of truth approached, I was knocked completely off-balance.
Oddly, though, nothing catastrophic happened. No one was rude to me; no one was mean.
Rather, as I tried unsuccessfully to hold it together, my equilibrium was upset by love.
Now, Jesus had a habit of showing up at the moments of his friends’ most extreme vulnerability. He’d reach out a hand, deflect criticism directed at a person in distress, quietly say something kind.
And that’s what happened to me.
The boys in the band reached out and spoke kindly to me. My friends stood with me when I wasn’t really standing for myself.
And it knocked me over, such that I could barely speak until I realised that actually I could, because they had given me back my voice, free from anxiety and ready for work. And the work was good. Even if the trumpet playing was not.
The thing is, I reckon, that discovering, or rather remembering, we are loved and cared for is sometimes the most discombobulating thing of all.
We are taught to be self-reliant, and finding that we are not is liable to crush us. It nearly crushed me.
But being shown that we can rely on someone else is quite another thing.
And that, as they say, is what friends are for.
The online gig was in support of Help Harry Help Others
I’ve been relying on the Fat and Frantic boys, in one way or another, for 36 years. They’re very reliable.