Being easy to be close to

Closeness used to run a small calculation first. How near to sit. Whether to turn your head slightly when you spoke. Whether something needed fixing before you got near anyone, and how many minutes that would take. It happened in under a second and you long ago stopped registering it as a decision, but a decision is what it was, and it ran every time. Nobody else ever mentioned it. That is the strange part. It was invisible to everyone in the room except the person doing it.

It is not running anymore. Somebody hugs you and there is no arithmetic in it, no half turn, no pulling back a beat early. Your children can put their face into your shoulder and neither of you is managing anything. You are simply a person who can be approached. That sounds minor until you consider how much of a life actually happens within arm's reach. Most love gets delivered at close range, and for years there was a checkpoint standing at the door.

There is something worth sitting with here, which is that the calculation was never only about other people. It was also about how you felt being near them. Anyone who has to manage themselves before contact ends up choosing slightly less contact, and then calls that their personality. Distance disguises itself as temperament. Being easy to be close to is not a skill you have to go learn. It is what is left over when the checkpoint comes down and you stop editing yourself before every embrace.

So do one deliberate thing today. Hug someone past the polite length. Sit beside your spouse instead of across from them. Let your kid climb on you without turning your face away out of old habit. Do not explain any of it, just do it. The people who love you have been meeting a slightly guarded version of you, and today they get the whole one. Thank God for arms that are free to hold people. Use them before the day is finished.