Acceptance of Intimacy

Intimacy is a function of acceptance. Recently my friend's, who lives in the US, grandfather, who lived in India, passed away. She is very sad since she did not have a chance to be with him in his final moments or to be part of the last services. She is sad because she was very close to her grandfather and now misses him even more knowing that even if she were to go back to India, she will not find him there anymore.

What makes a relationship so special that we long to be with the companion in the absence of their company? To understand the answer to this question we need to understand what sometimes makes it difficult to be together.

Think back of a time when you were in a difficult relationship - be it for a few minutes or for several years. A difficult relationship is such because of disagreement between the related. Not to say that agreement is the sole basis of a relationship, but failing to resolve disagreements or lack of inclination to acknowledge and accept differences and disagreements sure does lead to the death of a relationship's liveliness, even if the partners may choose to continue to be together. Being together is not the same as experiencing togetherness. There often hides great loneliness in a crowd.

The time when we feel most alive in a relationship is when we can be who we are - a 'who we are' that changes from time to time - now happy, now sad, now generous, now demanding, now benevolent, now revengeful. And yet, we are the sum total of all these paradoxical and seemingly opposite states of being. Rarely are we able to find - or be - such a person. Relationships are a struggle in dominance, assertion of freedom, desire for control, and an endless effort to chisel away other's 'undesirable' traits.

A being, compelled to conform to a forced image, is reduced to an object. A being, unlike an object, has the need to be free to express, evolve, and to be howsoever his or her life chooses to flow. That is the state in which the being is most comfortable - when it is free to be. To be whosoever and howsoever without the fear of rejection or the fear of being judged. It is only in the security of such a relationship that a being flowers.

Partners seek predictability as a means to security. However, nature of life is to be neither predictable nor to be secure. Nature of being is to be free and to flow in the direction of that expression.

The need to be free then seeks a relationship that allows that to happen. A relationship that accepts the person not for who they are but for what they could become, not for what can be made out of them, but the choice to be ever present, lovingly, to whatever they may choose to make of themselves. Only in total acceptance can there exist the comfort of togetherness, in which lies the absence of fear - the ripe and the only soil which can give birth to the delicate flower of intimacy.

Eternal and timeless

Restlessness. Anxiety? Which word to use to describe this constant inner nagging that goes on like a ceaselessly ticking clock hand.

I will like to slow down time so i can watch the clock hands move - tick - tick - tick - tick away and I ticking away with them.

Time moves too fast. Or so it seems. When there is ample of it, it goes a waste; when there is scarcity of it, it is useless. Then how does one deal with time without letting it get ahead of oneself so that one does not feel left behind?

If I stop time will the clock stop ticking? For that the clock will require the knowledge of time. But clock has no knowledge or connection to time other than what the society has given it. That is why stopping the clock does not freeze time. But here is lies the clue to freedom from time - time is time to me because I think of it as time. If I live in eternity, there is no time ... no matter how fast the clock ticks or how much it slows down.

Eternal - forever - always - ... - that which will always be - timeless - what is that? That which always is is just this - this momnt right here, right now. This moment - fragile, dying, being reborn every moment, every instant, verily insistent of its existence. Ignored but persistent. Transparent but solid. Foundation for all hope that is future, which is not. Bearer of all past that is memories, which is not. This moment. This timeless, precious, little, ignored, tiny fragile piece of endless existence. This moment is eternal. Being in this moment is eternity.