At my training session at JT’s gym, I swing open the glass door and call out, “Oh, thank God she’s here!” to make him laugh. He’s killing time waiting for me between clients, running on the treadmill to keep himself in shape. He laughs, pretends to check his mileage monitor as the treadmill slows. “Gee, only 17, eight-minute miles,” he sighs as he turns it off. I laugh at the lie, then I plop down in the chair next to his desk.

“What’s up?” he says, pulling out his chair as well and yawns while he waits for the latest installment of my past week’s activities. 

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” I say. 

He nods, yawns again. “I wake up every night at 3:30. But the good thing is, it doesn’t affect me at all.” 

“Yeah, I can see that,” I say. “Are you anxious about anything?” The dreaded cable pulls are behind me, waiting as I settle in. “We should talk about this.” 

“Nice try. Get up,” he says, ending the best of my delaying tactics. “Let’s see whatcha got.”

JT has learned the art of revealing nothing while having a conversation, which makes sense since he has to talk to someone new for an hour at least 8-10 times a day. At the computer all day, I am a boundary-challenged bean spiller. Do not confide in me—the brain hates to keep a secret—it’s spelled s-t-r-e-s-s. The alternative spelling is s-t-o-r-y, and we live for it.  

After demonstrating the way I am to lift some weights while simultaneously lunging, JT stands aside, and I take the stance, trying not to tip over. Yesterday, I spun around with my eyes closed in the shower and thought, Uh-oh, this could have gone badly. So, I tell him that maybe we should work on balance and not strength today. He is already on it, dragging over the heinous half-ball thing on which you must balance, much like trying to stand on one foot in a bouncy house while some kid jumps up and down right next to you.

JT and I feel the same way about virtually everything except politics, so we never talk about that, but our attitudes are often apparent in our responses to other things. 

“They’ve just discovered another rogue planet not connected to any solar system,” I report, excited about this discovery. He eyes me as if scientists are tricksters out to get us—their ulterior motive–to fool humanity about everything from planets to platelets. “How do they know that?” he asks.

“And tomorrow is the shortest day in history,” I add. “Thanks to the Earth spinning slightly faster, it’ll be 1.34 milliseconds less than the standard 24 hours.”

“How do they know?” he asks again. “Says who?”

This is often the response to facts I share, and it’s one that I can’t answer because I can’t reproduce the corresponding research proving this fact off the top of my head. I read it, but I just can’t retain it. I guess I only have the mental bandwidth to remember the fascinating end product of research, so that’s what I share. 

For instance, the Appalachians are far older and were once taller than the Rockies. I remember they are lower in altitude because they have eroded centuries longer, but I don’t remember how scientists know that. 

Being able to explain how seemingly impossible things could be true is something I’ve surrendered spiritually as well. I’ve experienced enough miracles not to need the “how.” Likewise, when I pray, I ask for what would be impossible for me to accomplish on my own, trusting that it is effortless for a power greater than myself. I see it as done– this healing, this reconciliation, this grace. Strategizing means I still think the universe needs my input. 

Hard pass, says the universe.

JT takes me off the half-ball and tells me to walk the length of the gym, heel-to-toe, lifting a 10-pound weight extended over my head. I do this easily, my confidence returning. “Want me to go faster?” I ask.

“No. I want you to close your eyes and do it backwards,” he says.

Our relationship is one of balance. We are so far apart politically we can only 

acknowledge that fact with a laugh or a joke once in a while. 

But I often ask what JT did on the weekend and it’s what I did, as well. And he has two daughters he adores, and I have two daughters I adore. And I listen to him put their welfare ahead of his own desires, week after week, and I know I’d walk backward and blindfolded across the Bay Bridge for mine, so there’s that. 

He loves a dog who is a real pain, and I love one of those, as well. He has a roof that needs replacing, and I have one, too.

I was recently told that my soul’s purpose in this life is to experience all forms of love—parental, romantic, for humanity at large. In this life, I needed to love as a sibling, a spouse, and a friend —surely, we all do. But that’s easy love. I don’t think it counts toward being a good person. Love like that makes you a regular person. It’s the least you can do.

I saw a greeting card the other day that said, “One of us is right, the other one is you.”

How do we find common ground when it feels as if our very morals conflict?

I don’t know. It’s like finding my way backward and blindfolded to those with whom I don’t agree. But I can place my attention on judgment and strategy, or I can ask that love magnifies all that we share.

Rumi wrote, “Out beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrongdoing, there is a field.

 “I’ll meet you there.” 

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.