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My Dear Kat,

I struggled to post tonight.  I didn’t want to just reiterate what we have been saying about agreement and balance because I felt the words would not differ enough to be useful.

This led me to thinking about language, and so I finally pulled out the metaphors we have used in this blog.

Thumbtacks
Imagine being barefoot in a room with thumb-tacks on the floor.  Even a few will inhibit your ability to dance, but once you find the room to be free of them, no limits apply.

Riding a bicycle
But how we do this is hard to pin down.  Maybe it’s like riding a bicycle.  At first, you fall over all the time; later, staying balanced becomes second nature.

The present is the path
And yet “do” is almost the wrong term, because there is no sense of effort; things happen effortlessly, again and again and again.  It is as if there is a path through life called the present that is clear and easy to walk.  To left and right, the past and the future have barbs, snares, pits of tar, that make progress so much more difficult.

On a leash
A partner who is only ninety-something percent accepting gives the feeling of being on a leash; you can run free most places, but at some point, a violent tug will occur, so the response is to run cautiously, or not at all.  But at 100%, a transforming quality occurs.

Riding in tandem
Many years ago I had the opportunity to ride rear-seat on a tandem.  I was used to steering on a bike, and I jerked the handlebars so fiercely that the forward rider could not keep the machine in balance.  Neither of us are doing that now.

Books and pages
…a book with pages; we think we are individual pages, but we are connected together in ways that are not seen by inspecting an individual page.

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My Dear Kat,

We don’t argue.  Realisation of that was the genesis of our exploration of our relationship.  We’ve said “Oh, we don’t argue because we don’t want to”, and that is part of it, but in addition to that, we are able to come to a mutually agreeable decision every time.

Now that is no doubt made simpler by our having similar opinions on tidiness, money, work, politics and more (though anyone who picks a seriously mismatched partner is either inexperienced, masochistic, or working through issues), but it’s not that we always make the same choices initially.  Instead, we each put out our position and then start looking for something that works for both of us.  We don’t defend our position, and we’re not overly attached to it; instead, we want to find something that works for both of us because we recognise that the other has equal rights to their needs, that their desires have equal validity, reality, importance.

It’s not that we’re equal in our desires, but that we see the other as having as much right to their position as ourselves, and that we are affected by the happiness (or otherwise) of the other.

Another thing is (to steal your term) the celebration of difference – that the other introduces a variety into life that would not otherwise be there, and we welcome change rather than fearing it.  Doing so is easier because of our mutual benevolence – that we don’t want to take any course of action that will harm the other, so in the light of that, it is easy to trust the choices and suggestions of the other.

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My Dear Kat,

I want to speak about balance.  The way we act together is very puzzling.  We come to agreement on what we do together without apparent effort or decision-making.  Certainly there are times when only one of us feels tired, talkative, sleepy, sexual, but mostly we concur on whether to walk, what movie to watch, when to separate, and all those other joint decisions.  It’s that process of deciding that is obscure; there is no sense of pitting my needs against yours, struggling until a winner emerges.  There is scarcely ever even a sense that we have different agendas at all.  But how can this be?  We’re different people with different clocks; the odds of being in sync become more improbable the more it happens.

It is as if we have moved our consciousness from our individual selves to us, that incorporeal being that has both our interests at heart.  I don’t invoke magical channels here; it’s likely that there are signals of body language, smell, voice, etc. by which we adjust to each other.  But such communication is not conscious, hence the puzzlement above, and more to the point, is irrelevant because the focus is on what we do, our intentionality, and here, my best reply is “nothing”.  We achieve this by being, not by doing, and the more still we are, the more intense the experience becomes.

Kit

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My Dear Kat,

Last night we came together late and just hung out, did the crossword, talked.  We both said how delightfully cosy it was, and so the question arises again, how do we do this?  The scientist would say that we each adjust our expectations and behavior to synchronise with the other, but look as I may, that is not what I see, for if that were the case, I would expect to see compromise, trade-offs, weighing the pros and cons.  I don’t.  Instead, I see a process that is non-verbal, that I don’t “make decisions”, but instead, the activities “come to me”.  But it does feel intentional on another level.  It feels as though we eschew words and thoughts and planning and allow some natural balance to take place.  It is like trusting the us and not letting “words with charge”, to use your memorable phrase, take over.

The result is a feeling of incredible lightness, airiness, freedom, liberty.

Many years ago I had the opportunity to ride rear-seat on a tandem.  I was used to steering on a bike, and I jerked the handlebars so fiercely that the forward rider could not keep the machine in balance.  Neither of us are doing that now.

Kit.

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