In relationship, we can’t help but relate the other person to images we have of how things should be. We want them to meet our unconscious images of what a relationship looks like, of mutual duties and responsibilities, of entrance and exit lines. But nobody can ever fit that image—it’s impossible.
Over time a person starts to break through the image as they move toward us, and we have to enlarge our view of the other, and that’s when relationship begins to happen. But what tends to occur is that we stick to our assumptions, we tighten up around our image of them, and they’re also working with their image of us, so there are these two image makers creating images of each other, trying to do whatever they can to hold on to the image of the person. And we depend on each other’s image making. We like the image they offer of ourselves, and they like the image we offer. And we’re not fully ourselves.
To really be able to appreciate the differences, rather than the similarities, between ourselves and others means a plurality of stories and images can exist simultaneously. Then we can allow our definitions of ourselves to be fluid and flexible and responsive and creative. Then it’s possible to be two together and not to be one. What we call one is really the difference between two people, not their summation. Miles Davis and Chet Baker both play trumpet and there’s nothing interesting about that fact. What’s interesting is that Miles Davis and Chet Baker play so differently within the same genre, with the same instrument, in the same cities and halls and theaters, with the same audiences sometimes, but one is Miles Davis and one is Chet Baker. Why can’t we do our relationships like this?
Where we really celebrate each other’s differences, in a way that’s not just political affect or a good new-age feeling, is via a commitment to freedom. I start to feel free when I work to guarantee a space where you can be free. It can be hard to relate to people who are in their eccentric selves because they don’t operate within an idiom that we’ve created for them, they don’t fit, and in their not-fitting there’s samadhi. The not-fitting is oneness, it is intimacy, and the opposite scenario, where we’re just relating inside this small world of what’s the same as us, is merger, is codependence. It’s ultimately dangerous because it shrinks our world and our hearts and our bodies.
We have a child who is autistic. His therapist, whose focus is fostering dynamic relationship building, uses a technique to harness attention, to encourage our son to visually reference us, and him. The technique involves doing something unexpected. The first time the therapist visited our home and was introducing us to the approach he uses, he stopped mid-stair and fell slowly into the wall. His body went rigid, his eyes were still. Carina and I thought for a moment that he’d had a stroke. We nearly panicked! He explained after that what he’d done was to (dramatically) force us to check in, to reference the situation. He was demonstrating a way of interrupting our expectations to harness our awareness. He got our attention by doing something out of the ordinary. The space that this opens is the possibility for anything, or anyone, to exist.