In asking the question, ‘what is it to care?’, I also wonder what it means ‘to be cared for?’ We readily recognize, for instance, that children need to be cared for, as do our aging parents. Children need adults who are engaged and responsive, looking out for their physical, emotional, and mental well-being, perhaps on occasion worrying about them, even at times scolding them for something or the other. And yet the young need the space to feel, to think, to express themselves, and to grow in their own way. Parents who are aging feel cared for when their children (and grandchildren) are present for them, support them as their physical needs increase, and remain in close communication with them. And yet they too may need their own space to live out the days of their lives on their own terms.
To care, then, perhaps implies having an empathetic connection as well as space in my relationship with another. It is a feeling of concern that does not crystallize into a fixity of expectations. Care in a relationship can never be static. It demands alertness to my predilection to become self-enclosed, to project one’s images, desires, or anxieties onto another. It manifests when there is affectionate watchfulness of what is happening with the other, and within myself. I may then be attentive and responsive to ever-changing situations as they present themselves each day.
There is also care outside the boundaries of human relationships. I could care for an animal or a plant, look after a pet dog or cat, a single plant in a pot, or a garden that needs tending. In paying attention to and looking after whatever it is that is cared for, I must put aside self preoccupation, turn my gaze to that which is out there, and respond to what is required to nourish life out there. In doing so, the feeling of care opens the heart and refreshes life within.
Is there also caring for the self? What could ‘self-care’ mean and how is it distinct from ‘self-preoccupation’? There is of course a care for the body and its well-being. Self-care also suggests that one is aware of the movements of the ‘self’, allowing it space to reveal itself and tell its own moving, shifting, story. This is the ‘human story’, the story of all manner of human predilections that we carry within us, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the sorrow, the joy and everything in between. Listening to this story—without reaction whenever possible—may allow for a measure of self-knowing as well as empathy and connection with people and with nature.
Beneath this on-going murmur and tumble of the human story, there may on occasion be an opening into that silent space in which the stream of life flows, life that expresses itself in myriad changing forms. Is it not in this shared life stream that care is born?