I had a dream last night in which I was kissing a handsome young man and no, it was not the handsome young waiter who offered his help yesterday. Don’t get excited! It was not a sexy fantasy but rather a sweet and deep connection of two people. The kiss was barely a touch.
This morning after I awoke I wanted to feel that connection again. I tried to think my way back into it but I discovered that the experience of the connection could not be created with the conscious mind. I recalled the dream as a vibrant encounter but I could not recreate that when I was awake.
It occurs to me that this limitation applies to human connection of the waking hours as well.
When you have that rare experience of deep connection, it is stunning, it is a gift, it is the very reason we live. Or so it seems to me because it gives us a glance behind the veil of the conscious world within which we usually function. But if we try to create a connection, to force our way into one, it just does not work.
I realize how much of my life, the twists and turns of my path have been shaped by my desire for connection. I have mistaken sexual attraction for connection and while they are sometimes both present, sometimes they are not.
I have also committed to relationships where there was connection but as it turned out it was not the material of a long term journey. That connection would have been better left in its individual moment and carried as a sweet memory rather than trying to build a house upon it.
We love connection so we tend to build romantic dreams around it. We take this random and rare gift and create stories about what it means and what should happen next and on and on, this is us trying to recreate the beauty of the dream.
But real human connection (which by the way can happen with animals) does not mean anything, it predicts no future nor demands no plan, it knows no time and needs no response. It just is the single most magically unrestricted human experience we can have.