Did you ever instantly know you were going to like and trust someone for a long, long time? Maybe you only knew them for a short while but it seemed that you had known them your whole life, as if there were a timeless connection between you and them? I’m wondering as you read this, if you can remember the feeling of that, and just how wonderful it was, because sometimes life has a way of making us remember those things, right prior to discovering that we can experince those feelings again with someone.
Me … well, I don’t think that kind of thing can be forced. No essay or words or video tape can create it. Words and appearances are only expressions, the vehicles that contain the essance that moves us. It can only happen naturally as the expression of an energy between two people, but when it does … you know that feeling of incredible bonding, when all the barriers melt and drop away, and two people come together, fused on one spiritual essance, the mingling of energies feeding one to the other, building and increasing and intensifying, mingling into an expression of aliveness that words can initiate but never capture fully? It has instead to be indulged inside your own imagination … dwelled on, and toyed with, deep, deep inside you.
Speaking to you as a person who can experience that kind of connection, just how much can you look forward to enjoying that with someone who moves you in that way? As you remember what that would be like, and find those possibilities opening before you, in such a way that anything else blurs into insignificance, how powerfully will you feel that urge to post and find out more about this person who has so moved you, with just words on a page?
Yeah, I’ve met a handful of people with whom I have instantly “clicked.” We got the same jokes, practically finished each other’s sentences, liked the same books and movies. Five times out of ten, it turned out after we really got to know each other better, we had both “invented” the other person and gotten attached to this imaginary being. We usually stayed friends, but the “soul mates” crap went out the window upon clear-headed consideration.
I know it really can seem that way, but I think that’s just because I talk about the way people think about things anyway on a really deep level, so because what I’m describing fits their inner experience so well, it may seem like I’m messing with them, but really I’m just discussing what they know anyway. See, 'cause there’s what you know, there’s what you know you know, and there’s you know, but you don’t know you know. So when the things you know but don’t know you know become the things you know you know, you can just think things differently, you know?
oNe thing that it is important to remember is that memory itself is a very flexable thing: our brains seemed hardwired to create memories at the drop of a hat, and to reform memories as it becomes apropriate. When I look back on my husband and I’s courting days, it seems as if the fact that we would vend up happily married was obvious right from the momment we met. But I know, becaue I remember particular conversations and have read thigs I wrote during that time, that such things were not obvious to me then. And I also know that if (god forbid) my marrige were to crash and burn, my memories would shift to make it seem obvious that the whole relationship was doomed from the start.
I really wish memory was reliable–the fact that it isn’t is tantamount to having the self be an unreliable concept. But the fact is, our memories cannot be relied on.