Showing up is love actualized

Aristotle wrote about the distinction between what a thing could be and what it really is. A thing's nature is fulfilled in its activity, not in its potential. An eye that could see and an eye that is seeing, he said, are not the same thing.

The same is true for love. The capacity for love becomes real only through its demonstration, and there are, of course, many ways to demonstrate love: devotion, poetry, sex, listening, protecting, and perhaps the most significant, showing up.

I am a chaplain and showing up is the table stakes for the job. 

I am also an Aries sun-Pisces rising-Virgo moon, ambivert, empath, Slytherin house, INTP, prefer dark meat, and like to show up in big ways for the people I love.  

But the flip side of showing up big is that I can forget your birthday. 

I can let an event or a moment that matters to you slip by. I often wait to call until there’s something big to talk about or it’s time to catch up. It’s not because I don't care, but because I get caught in my own loop and the small things don't send up a flare.

So if I know this, why don’t I do it more?

Attention is finite, and I live in a world that points it inward. My schedule, my goals, my work, my own story, and a whole culture built to reflect me back at myself. The people I love are the one part of that world that doesn't ask for my attention. And when I did give it, I gave it big, one grand gesture that I believed covered all the small things I'd let go. So the smaller opportunities lose, in a thousand quiet auctions a day, each one settled before I notice it happened. My heart is in the right place and the potential to show up survives, intact, underneath. It just never gets actualized.

Showing up takes work. It's a practice and a skill, the kind you only get by doing. 

Know what matters. Remember when. Notice a moment. Understand the story and what is meaningful to this specific person. Then do it.

As Aristotle might say, you only become someone who shows up by showing up.

Since I'm an Aries, I built Quency to help. 

You don't show up more by trying harder; decades of behavioral science say environments beat intentions, so I changed the environment. If every app on my phone is bidding for my attention, then I moved the practice to the place that already has it. The caring stays mine, but the app carries the parts of showing up that can be carried, the remembering, the noticing, the when. It's the digital version of what that worn little notebook my grandma used to have, the canonical source of the family's birthdays, anniversaries, and addresses.

Half of showing up is knowing when. The other half is knowing how, and for that I borrowed from the chaplain's trade. Every person I love gets a profile, who they are to me, what I know about them, what I love about them, the same way I'd learn a patient's story while in the room with them. 

It's not a novel idea, but it's helping me turn the potential of showing up into the thing itself.

Somewhere, right now, there’s a loved one who doesn’t feel seen who would light up when you show up.

with love,

D.S. Moss