Brief Treatise Against Sharing

The opposite of sharing is withholding. If the sunlight falls aslant on that patch of oxeyes, but I don’t share it, did it even happen? In service to an imagined community, I capture it on my iPhone, but the depth of the shadow is not realised, the scent of baked earth won’t translate.

To be an oxeye daisy in summer is to be filled with self-assurance. Unconstrained. Wide open to the world. No-one else walks this path. If I never returned, oxeye would bloom the same. Convinced of its necessity in the scheme of things - yellow-hearted, each petal a finger of bone. An oxeye daisy holds its own.

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Pereginatio est tacere - to be silent keeps us pilgrims.

Sharing won’t shut up. Would this conversation be better served by my silence? The wise words of a mystic. Silence opens the door and allows others to go in first. On a page, it is the margin. In a forest, the space between leaves. Asked to prove itself, it sighs. Silence takes flight in the gloaming - and loves the cold. In hard water, it erodes, slowly, over time, until it disappears underground. In sunshine, it evaporates. Its barometer reads true. It’s specific.

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Sharing can be prefixed:

1. Oversharing - the burden of information, opinion, story. Words as weights that hold us in place when we would otherwise flee. False intimacy. Not hard-won, slow-burning real love.

2. Thanksforsharing - a meme, a movie starring Gwyneth about sex, something to say when someone opens up. I call mussels to mind, tight lipped at low tide. Mute. How they crack in the pot, and spill their guts.

3. Timeshare - when I share the space you were in last week. Grit of sand on tiles, spiral of peel beneath the sofa, the undressed lemon browning in the fruit bowl. Some lollies in the freezer. Some boardgames. Otherwise, this sharing is empty.

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Sharing rules its kingdom like a Queen - not the honeybee kind, that spends her life in the dark, combing cells, prolific mother, in service to her hive. Her work is emotional regulation, generosity of eggs, four light feet on the wax keeping everyone in step. No ranting, outrage, noise, just the quiet confidence to raise more like her.

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Unlike silence, sharing gets carried away. It rants and raves. Then, a stitch drops, the conversation moves on, and something does not feel right. Later - postshare - we go over it all. Garment unravelled in the half-light to a row of pearl where it all went wrong. We said too much. Casting on, we feel the delicacy of conversation, and how much there is to lose.

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The antidote to sharing is solitude. The only withdrawal that increases wealth. It requires a horizon, stable and true: the definition of a mountain, some trees at dusk, the thin blue line where ocean and sky split. It can make do with a spitting fire, or the wash of waves on a beach. It requires our full attention.

Vincent Van Gogh wrote:

There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no-one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passersby see a wisp of smoke coming through the chimney, and go along their way. Look here, what must be done? Must one tend the inner fire, have salt in oneself, wait patiently yet with how much impatience for the hour when somebody will come and sit down - maybe to stay? Let him who believes in God wait for the hour that will come sooner or later. ¹

To be well-seasoned. Warmed from within. Patient. We can only hope to have something to say when the hour finally comes.

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Photo credit @phetovic.

Sharing is the body’s way of compensating for inner lack. It’s the croque monsieur when all we want is a toastie. Mother-of-the-bride millinery. The studiously inflated C.V.

Look over there, it says, not straight at me.

Once, in a sapling relationship, a boy and I were advised to expose the skeletons in our closets - past loves, one-night stands, conquests from our age of discovery. We dragged every last shin bone connected to hip bone into the light. A heap of moon-pale remains. I loved him; he was earnest and funny. His family called me daughter before we had picked the bones clean.

I moved away, we wrote to one another, but we could not escape the haunting. Now, if I hear the word zucchini, I think of him - the sweep of his knife through soft, green courgette, how he laughed at courgette, the lack of conviction in his cooking. All the while skeletons danced in the shadows, a background music of castanets, a distraction.

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Sharing has a shaky moral compass. It swoons, is easily influenced. To follow its leading in a crowded room, we might end up where we started, no deeper in, no further on. It balks at directions. It is a man with a map. It guides entire movements from its true north, running them aground, steering them into the weeds. My truth, it calls out. No, my truth.

If sharing shape shifts, solidarity stays the course. It listens. Keeps the beat with its human heart. Crosses judgement, scorn and pity off the list because it knows, deep down, that suffering is universal.

St. Anthony, born to Egyptian peasants in 251, lived alone in the desert for much of his life. When he emerged as an old man, people would come to him seeking wisdom. To the one who asked, “What should I do?” He said: “Control your tongue”.

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’”

Solidarity says, I am just like you. It closes gaps. Each year it gets softer, smoother, its edges rounded like a pebble at the beach. Eroded and more compact. Something you want to carry in your hand for comfort.

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To share is an end in itself. An unburdening. Its design a circle. An endless loop, doomed to repeating the same mistakes. It is propped up by words like accountability, and, a problem shared.

Like the time I rang in the new year with ecstatic dance. School hall lights glared, a naked Christmas tree in the corner, someone apologising for the cold. Before any music, or sign of dancing, we had to sit, in circle, and share. I was no longer one in a room of strangers seeking embodied escape. I was Bethany who’d had a rollercoaster of a year with a publisher, and liked spending time in nature. It all went down hill from there, and I danced my way out the door at half past nine.

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Chat is sharing’s close cousin. Here, in the west of Ireland, they say, “Chat t’ya,” instead of goodbye. Affirmation of an ongoing conversation, a pause during which the weather changes, an album is released, LIDL gets a self-checkout. When we meet again, we pick up in the middle. I see it at the school gates, and with my neighbours. A slow and careful construction. Some chat about the weather. Some imagining the future. A grand stretch in the day. Enjoy it while it lasts. How’s your mum? Any plans for the weekend? All the generous, measured ways of being human. Chat is colloquial. Homegrown. My postman says, “Sure look it,” or, simply, “Look it.” It is a gentle way to shift gear when chat verges on sharing.

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Confiding, then, has a room of its own. See how smoke rises from its chimney? All the gritty real stuff lives there - the life we are truly living; the hurt, hope and disappointment; the imagined self we did not turn out to be. It is invitation only. Designed with no-one in mind. Comfortably messy. A fridge full of food in the corner. Neither bought nor sold - it should not be monetised. Its art is cultivation, the careful tending of space between people we love. The safety.

It beds down with intimacy, vulnerability, and truth (a muscular word that asks more of us than we think we can bench). It values privacy. Sacred ground. In Irish, it is Anam Cara².

When we grasp that, truly wrestle it to the ground and pin it in place, we will see the whole. The riotous scheme to which we all belong, for better or worse. Connected to all, but known by few. An abundance.

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If I were to make a poultice of oxeye leaves, I could treat those tender places where sharing has left its mark. Sharing might not draw blood, but it does bruise. It won’t count the cost. It won’t show remorse. There isn’t a drop of shame in it. No higher purpose. No aftercare. No heart.

Unlike other daisies, oxeye stays open all night. Moon daisy. You see it all, and say nothing.

1. Vincent Van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, vol 1, p197

2. Soul friend.