An older piece of contemplation I didn't want to lose as my old blog site closes...
Consider if you will the coordinated movements of a couple in bed together for 6, 8 hours a night. Snuggled this way and that, spooned front to back and back to front, sleeping cheek to cheek, sole to sole, sometimes even; cheek to cheek and soul to soul. The rolling and turning together, all the while not pulling the covers off your partner. The give and take, the back and forth, the juxtaposition of male and female spending 1/3 of their day in a nightly close order drill. This is not synchronized sleeping, this is mattress dancing.
Understand this form of dancing has nothing to do with measuring the compressive strength of a coil spring mattress through marathon reciprocal motion testing. This is about a couple sharing intimate space in an intimate way. This is bonding so strong that it transcends thought, space and time. This is the next level.
The dance is difficult to learn and there are no short cuts. There is no Rosetta Stone CD; no immersion classes; no 90 day extreme program to teach the dance. It is something accomplished over not weeks, or months or even years, but decades of unconsciously and subconsciously dancing together. It cannot be done quickly.
After awhile the newness wears off, there are multiple false steps with frequent trips to the (if you will forgive me mixing metaphors) penalty box for elbowing, cross checking even high sticking. Snoring and bed hogging tend to be thrown about too. The thing to avoid is a major penalty for fighting. As time goes on, there are points where all you want to do is steal the covers and push your partner out of bed.
The dance is hard, and I mean REALLY hard to learn. The hard part of the dance is the requirement that each partners let go of themselves, so they can forge a new being. The you and I becomes an us. Actually you don’t really ever learn it. The dance is ever evolving into a more complicated being, unknown steps are discovered, and the depth and richness of the dance grows with each passing year. The end result is a melding of spirits into a creature never seen by human kind before. Like most things of great value, it is the process, not the end result that matters.
I can hear you yelling at me now. WHAT GIVE UP WHO I AM? It is not so much giving up who you are as much as it is a new you, functioning inside a framework that includes another person’s energy and spirit. I remain, in large part, a grumpy loner who loves woodworking and wordsmithing. My partner loves crafts and baking. We are still very individual people. The difference is when making a decision; my first thought goes to my partner, not to me. She is the priority.
The dance is successful because you both commit to it fully. This dance (using my third and final metaphor) requires you go all in, all the time.
You succeed not because of yourself, but in spite of yourself.
