We Are the Meeting Place

There is a movement underneath human relationship that I have spent years mistaking for the problem.

We move toward each other and away again.

We long for union and defend our separateness. We merge, differentiate, reach, retreat, surrender, resist. We want to disappear into another person and, sometimes almost in the same instant, need to find ourselves again.

Psychology gives us many ways of understanding this movement. Attachment. Autonomy. Enmeshment. Abandonment. Intimacy. Differentiation. Trauma.

All of these descriptions are useful.

But I have begun to wonder whether they describe something even more fundamental.

Perhaps the movement between fusion and separation is not merely a psychological dynamic.

Perhaps it is a mirror.

A human expression of the movement between unity and multiplicity itself.

We experience ourselves as separate beings. There is a boundary to my body. I cannot directly inhabit your experience and you cannot inhabit mine. I can touch you, speak to you, enter you, love you, hurt you and understand something of you. Still, there remains a distance between us.

And precisely because there is distance, there can be encounter.

Without separation there is no other.

Without otherness there is no meeting.

Perhaps the human being does not simply exist as an isolated individual who subsequently enters into relationship.

Perhaps the human being is continually constituted in this movement.

The human being emerges where unity encounters itself as separation.

Then relationship is not something that happens to an already completed self.

Relationship is one of the places in which self and other continually come into existence.

We are already participating

This changes something about the idea of freedom.

We like to imagine that we stand outside the system and decide whether or not to enter.

But we don’t.

We are embodied. We perceive. We desire. We respond. Other people affect us before we have decided what we think about them. A face changes our nervous system. A voice changes our breathing. Rejection contracts us. Attraction moves us forward. Danger mobilises us. Tenderness can soften something before thought has caught up.

We are already plugged in.

Not necessarily to a literal machine or mystical field. I don’t know what the ultimate nature of this is.

But phenomenologically, the fact is difficult to escape:

we are always already in relation.

You are touched.

The body responds.

Meaning forms.

And usually, long before we call it a choice, a movement has already begun.

Toward.

Away.

Against.

With.

Trauma narrows the movement

This is also where trauma becomes important.

Trauma does not create the fundamental movement between connection and separation. But it can drastically reduce our freedom inside it.

When the organism has learned that closeness means danger, separation may become urgent.

When it has learned that separation means abandonment, union may become urgent.

Then we no longer simply move.

We are pulled.

Hold on.

Get away.

Please love me.

Don’t come near me.

Submit.

Control.

Disappear.

Attack.

The greater the activation, the fewer possibilities seem to remain.

What looks from the outside like a decision may be an organism travelling down the only road it can currently see.

This does not mean there is no agency.

It means agency has conditions.

And one of those conditions is the capacity to remain present long enough for more than one possibility to become visible.

Presence creates degrees of freedom

This is where my work has increasingly arrived.

Not at control.

Not at detachment.

Not at transcending our humanity.

At presence.

An experience appears.

The body responds.

Meaning forms.

Presence anchors.

Curiosity remains.

Presence does not prevent the first response.

It does not make us invulnerable to another person. It does not eliminate desire, fear, attraction, aggression, longing or grief.

It gives us somewhere to stand while they move through us.

And in that tiny interval something extraordinary becomes possible.

Another movement.

I can feel the impulse to fuse without immediately disappearing into you.

I can feel the impulse to leave without immediately abandoning you.

I can feel desire without turning you into its solution.

I can feel fear without making you its cause.

I can be affected without surrendering authorship of what happens next.

Perhaps this is what freedom actually looks like in a relational organism.

Not independence from the field.

Steerage within it.

The meeting place

This also changes what I mean by the self.

Perhaps I am neither the isolated individual nor the undifferentiated whole.

Perhaps I am the meeting place.

Animal and consciousness.

Body and meaning.

Self and other.

Separation and unity.

The world enters me through sensation and I enter the world through response.

Again and again.

There is no final arrival in which I become perfectly autonomous.

And there is no healthy union in which difference disappears.

There is movement.

Contact.

Differentiation.

Return.

The task is not to escape that movement.

The task is to become increasingly capable of inhabiting it.

To know when I am being pulled.

To feel what is happening in my body.

To recognise the meaning my mind is producing.

To remain present when an old dynamic wants to take over.

And, where possible, to choose the next movement with greater clarity.

This is why presence matters.

Not because the present moment is peaceful.

Often it isn’t.

The present moment is simply the only place where the movement is actually happening.

And therefore the only place where something new can enter it.

We are not separate beings trying to find our way back to unity.

We are the place where separation and unity meet.

And perhaps consciousness is what allows that meeting, for a moment, to become aware of itself.