FOUR: Accompaniment

“After the illuminating gaze, accompaniment is the next step in getting to know a person.

Accompaniment, in this meaning, is an other-centered way of moving through life. When you’re accompanying someone, you’re in a state of relaxed awareness—attentive and sensitive and unhurried. You’re not leading or directing the other person. You’re just riding alongside as they experience the ebbs and flows of daily life. You’re there to be of help, a faithful presence, open to whatever may come. Your movements are marked not by

willfulness but by willingness—you’re willing to let the relationship deepen or not deepen, without forcing it either way. You are acting in a way that lets other people be perfectly themselves.

Accompaniment is a necessary stage in getting to know a person precisely because it is

so gentle and measured. As D. H. Lawrence put it:

Whoever wants life must go softly towards life, softly as one would go towards a deer and fawn that are nestling under a tree. One gesture of violence, one violent assertion of self- will and life is gone But with quietness, with an abandon of self-assertion and a fullness

of the deep true self one can approach another human being, and know the delicate best

of life, the touch.

If I’d been better schooled back then in the art of accompaniment, I would have

understood how important it is to honor another person’s ability to make choices. I hope I would have understood, as good accompanists do, that everybody is in their own spot, on their own pilgrimage, and your job is to meet them where they are, help them chart their own course. I wish I had followed some advice that is rapidly becoming an adage: Let others voluntarily evolve.

A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think.” (Brooks,

“How to Know a Person”, p.52)

“Finally, a person who is good at accompaniment understands the art of presence.

Presence is about showing up.