How the Farmboy Was Finally Reborn
You be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
—FEZZIK
In essence, Westley’s story in The Princess Bride is a reincarnation tale. You could say that Westley reincarnates twice: once upon the high seas, under the direction of his pirate guru, to let go of the Farmboy’s naïve hope of salvation. The second time is far more literal, as he returns from his mostly dead state with some help from his friends, in order to let go of the Man in Black’s obsession with the other kind of story line, the cynic’s narrative.
Reincarnation is a hard concept to consider literally. When it came to such topics, ones that could not be verified by experience, Chögyam Trungpa used to say something that is, surprisingly, also a line in The Princess Bride: “Your guess is as good as mine.”1 People are often surprised, considering how scientifically grounded and psychologically relevant Buddhist thought appears to be, when someone starts talking about reincarnation as if it were fact. This topic seems to be a big departure from the more experiential “touch it, feel it, taste it” approach implied by a life of mindfulness. Many people have told me how much they admire Buddhism … except for reincarnation.
Certainly, one way of looking at reincarnation is mystical, religious, and distancing to our secular beliefs. It posits a relationship between the continuity of consciousness and observable physical matter that isn’t scientifically provable. Reincarnation can lead to all kinds of story lines that need to be dropped about which sage, hero, or celebrity you might have been in a past life. At the same time, the theory that your consciousness simply ends when you die, the main premise of scientific materialism, is also not provable. I am agnostic when it comes to any literal interpretation of reincarnation. Anybody who presumes to know what happens after death without a method of testing their hypothesis is making an unscientific assumption, including materialists who claim that consciousness is completely reducible to the physical brain. Better, here and elsewhere, to hold the space of uncertainty.
There is another way to think about reincarnation, a way that avoids unverifiable claims in either direction, a way that is much more accessible to our lived experience and doesn’t require mysticism to make itself practical. Consider reincarnation a Buddhist plot device, one we use to describe both the continuities and discontinuities of identity. Have you ever gone to bed stressed out and caught up in anxiety, and then gotten a good night’s sleep, or just talked to somebody you trusted, or practiced a little bit, and woken up the next morning feeling refreshed and liberated, like you were still you, but that “you” was in a different situation, like something unnamable had lifted or shifted? Waking up in the morning is an act of reincarnating to your daily life. In a sense, every single present moment is an unheralded reincarnation, an interplay between continuity and discontinuity, chains of causality mingling with gaps of spontaneity.
When you pay attention, the relationship between the current now and past and future moments is quite tenuous. We know that the present moment exists in reference to the previous one, but the present is never actually defined by the past. There is always a gap, a break between the momentum of the past and the trajectory of the future. In that gap of nowness, the experience of yourself and your world is in a constant process of rebirth and possibility. This way of considering reincarnation isn’t even metaphorical; within this one lifetime, reincarnation happens constantly. Our bodies are in a constant state of regeneration as cells replace themselves over and over, until we are literally composed of brand-new material. Our minds are visited by a recycling of views, preferences, and opinions. Yet there is some miraculous connection between the “me” that existed in 1987 and the me that exists in 2017. If you are paying attention, the present is always inhabited by a new “you.”
Taken this way, reincarnation is never proposed as data-driven truth, but rather as a way to personally investigate the aspects of our human experience that are continuous and consistent, alongside those aspects that are spontaneously shifting, open to reinterpretation. In Westley’s case, this reincarnation of identity happens twice. He first learns that he can’t just be a naïve Farmboy, especially not when it comes to true love. To surrender hope of salvation, he has to confront impermanence directly. He has the former Dread Pirate Roberts to thank for this first rebirth as the Man in Black.
But he’s not done. Westley’s second reincarnation, his return from his “mostly dead” state, is what lets him experience true love. In order to fully connect with another person, we all need to overcome the ways our hearts have gone numb. Just as the rom-com gives us a story line of salvation, modern culture gives us a very cynical story line, and it is this acquired contempt for optimism that we must overcome.
The Final Reincarnation: Dropping the Cynic’s Story Line
SOMETIMES IT SEEMS OUR WORLD has been surrendered to the cynics. In culture, news media, politics, art, storytelling, and romance alike, it often feels that optimism has become synonymous with fluff, cliché, and stupidity. Tell anyone to look on the bright side, and you will get many an eye-roll. Good news is rarely clickbait; the bad news and fearmongers catch more views. Obviously, there is good reason to err on the side of pessimism. The oceans are rising. Racism, violence, and inequality abound. Some politicians really are corrupt, and our leaders appear more like humorless versions of the bad guys from The Princess Bride every year. It also makes sense to be cynical about relationships. By any standard, most relationships simply don’t work out. Much of what is presented spiritually is demonstrably bullshit, clichéd recipes for wisdom, when real wisdom can only be uncovered through direct experience. So, yes, our cynicism is understandable, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an extreme belief.
When your trust is shipwrecked, the sense memory of the pain of betrayal makes you not want to fall into similar traps ever again. You become terrified of blind spots; you learn strategies to avoid anything that reminds you of old wounds. The heartbreak and grief of things not turning out the way you expected make you want to stay as far from optimism as you can. Out of this aversion, you begin to find strength in attacking optimism, defending yourself from pain by going on the offensive against all the inauthenticities of the world. The cynic discovers the sharpness and power found within a critique of other people’s story lines. But this addiction to perpetual critique is just another way to avoid feeling, a way to cling to the certainty of numbness, and to avoid the vulnerability of living in an uncertain world.
Our culture often assigns the highest intellectual ranking to the critic, the person most capable of slicing through the naïve story lines of others. If you can demonstrate someone else’s hypocrisy, or tear someone’s misperception down to size, or troll someone’s ego with the best of memes, then you might claim the prize of smartest person in the (virtual) room. For the person who has lost hope in humanity, this sharpness might be the best remaining chance for happiness. Cynics can’t be messed with, because they cut the world before it can cut them (again), avoiding vulnerability by stabbing through the falsehoods of others.
Skepticism contains tremendous accuracy. After all, every relationship is defined by the boundaries of death, either the death of the body—the best-case scenario, according to any model of romantic longevity, is that you make it all the way “until death do you part”—or the death of an identity, a particular incarnation of who you are and what you want. (This sort of death is what often happens in a breakup.) My history with romance, my family and lineage histories, alongside my study of the teachings of impermanence—all these gave me much to be skeptical about when it came to creating a successful relationship.
The rom-com myth takes its toll on all of us. Disappointed by false idols, the mind understandably careens toward the other extreme, the cynic’s apathy and nihilism. We become edgy and doubtful about finding any joy, a place to be ourselves, cynical about the prospect of belonging to any workable relationship. Our thoughts take on a structure defined by belief in negative permanence. Things are bad right now, they’re always going to be bad, and as far as I can remember, they always were bad. In this realm, not only is Buttercup a myth, but so is any sense of meaning. In this more depressive extreme, we chase a different set of ghosts. We make choices based on a kind of self-destructive irony.
If we can’t have something ideal, we think, then at least we can have something painful enough to qualify as masochistic profundity, our own private dystopia. After all, these days, who doesn’t prefer dystopia to utopia, Blade Runner to Walt Disney? “Look at all those pretty red flags,” we say, not even sure if we’re being sarcastic anymore, not worried if our choices lead only to pain.2 Yes, we let go of our hope of a savior, but this tearing down of optimism is no more truthful to our experience than the myth of saviors was. The cynic, the Man in Black, is just as extreme as the Farmboy, even if the cynic resides in the culturally cooler of the two extremes. Salvation and cynicism are both just story lines. Both must be recognized, befriended, and then released, again and again and again.
As I ventured further into dating, the volume rose on the voice of my inner cynic. Each time there was a miscommunication, each time there was a rejection, each time I felt either smothered or forgotten, each time I heard of a friend’s partnership collapsing into a messy rubble of resentment, I could choose to tell myself that nothing was ever going to work out in the end. Furthermore, I could even use the Buddhist teachings on impermanence and emptiness to bolster my skepticism in a preemptive “Buddha told you so” kind of way. I refer to this preemptive quasi-Buddhist cynicism as “impermanence sabotage.” I could always find, or construct, a spiritual quote to demonstrate that things not working out was simply the nature of samsara, the result of the cycle of confusion and projections that couldn’t be satisfied. We could even use the inner cynic to become dismissive of self-care, sabotaging the wellness of mind and body under some false belief that health is impermanent, and that therefore taking care of ourselves is just too big a burden.
It is true: nothing is going to “work out.” Or, rather, whatever does work out will eventually come unraveled. That’s the fluidity of impermanence at work. All that is born will die. All that is solid melts into air, and all that is holy will be profaned, as Karl Marx famously wrote. There is literally nothing to hold on to. You win, impermanence. You will always win.
This is an important message, one that the former Dread Pirate Roberts teaches Westley very well. You’re going to die. No savior, no fairy tale, and if I don’t kill you tomorrow, something else will. All romance ends in death, all expectations will be frustrated, and all hungry ghosts will keep on chasing their projections until they exhaust themselves and finally get the message. If you are going to chase your hopes, to try to use a relationship to escape from yourself, then please, please, please, for the good of everyone, get used to disappointment.
Buddhism is a great tradition for religious skeptics who still yearn for an ethical and psychological framework to guide them. Perhaps this is why Buddhism continues to catch on in our increasingly agnostic and atheistic era. The dharma implores us to sharpen our swords and be honest about what helps and what harms, both ourselves and others. The teachings on ethics are meant to be pursued in a trial-and-error manner, and when you discover a view that doesn’t work, you offer it up for its own dissolution. It was exactly this kind of take-no-prisoners approach to looking at one’s own experience, this kind of invitation and even encouragement to skepticism, that attracted me to Buddhism as a teenager.
In my sophomore year of high school, still resentful about the collapse of my nuclear family, I read Chögyam Trungpa and Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretations of emptiness. Their writings were commanding, as if they had sharpened their own swords, and yet their words didn’t seem dogmatic. They weren’t telling me what to think. Instead, these teachers left tremendous space for the skepticism that I felt toward matriculating into a world of cultural constructs and rules, rules that often seemed random at best, yet were sometimes presented like absolute truths. Buddhist thought gave me a safe arena in which to fence with all my feelings of disenfranchisement. My favorite Buddhist text regarding dropping the story line was, and still is, a pithy, and quite famous, commentary called the Heart Sutra.
In this short dialogue, a sort of Cliffs Notes (or the “heart”) of a much longer body of teachings, a conversation takes place between two of the historical Buddha’s senior students. Meanwhile, the Buddha sits quietly and listens. One of his students completely deconstructs everything the Buddha has taught them so far, demonstrating that any spiritual teaching is simply a conceptual mapping, a signpost, a signifier of approximate meaning. No teaching is without context, and outside their appropriate context, the concepts found in any spiritual teachings will always forfeit their meaning. After this dialogue, in which Siddhartha’s sacred words have been literally trashed while he sits quietly listening, trashed by his most cherished students no less, the Buddha applauds and validates his students’ skepticism.
In other words, in this text, the founder of a spiritual tradition listens to his most senior student decimate everything he has taught so far, and then expresses deep gratitude to the student for doing so! For a leader to be able to do that takes an enormous depth of self-confidence, an ability to accommodate skepticism as a necessary tool of growth. My teenage thought at reading this text was simple: the Buddha was fearless. Or, in the vernacular of 1990s New York City: the Buddha was dope.
There is a subtle difference between being a skeptic and being a cynic, although they do share one crucial weapon: a bullshit detector. In classic Tibetan Buddhism, this BS detector is symbolized, surprisingly, by weaponry, usually swords, sometimes arrows or spears. Swords are everywhere in Himalayan Buddhist art, and they represent the skeptic’s ability to slice through his own confused ideas about reality.
It is good to give your inner skeptic a voice, just enough to keep you honest, just enough to make you able to wield the sword of discernment. When the Man in Black emerges on the screen, it is clear he’s learned cynicism’s power to sharpen the mind. His dialogue is even greater than his fighting skills. But he’s also a cynic, and his bitterness makes him unwilling to admit the real truth at hand: that he wears a mask to cover a broken heart.
If nothing can mess with you, it means nothing can touch you. If you wear a mask, you can always perform, but you can’t connect. We set aside one night a year for this purpose. But outside costume parties, masks only serve as a defense mechanism. Skepticism, on the other hand, is an unmasked, naked inquisitiveness. Skepticism demonstrates true curiosity, a willingness to live without swallowing easy answers to life’s tough questions. But cynicism is something else. As the great sage Fezzik notes, “People in masks cannot be trusted.” For me, this is the most important line of the movie, one of the greatest spiritual lessons I have ever received.
The biggest problem with cynicism is that you still have to exist in the world. Despite possessing a seeming preference to remain forever sidelined, perpetually trolling the perceived shortcomings of others (a great strategy to avoid failing yourself), the cynic inevitably has to make choices. Our most cynical choices are based on a different kind of story line, a narrative that takes the form of the apathetic mantra “nothing really matters.” This mantra usually manifests in acts of materialism. The materialist privileges disposable pleasure above the cultivation of qualitative shifts in habit, preferring instant gratification over long-term connection with self and others. The logic of materialism’s story line is this: “If nothing really matters, I may as well just get prowess or pleasure. If I find the best way to feel good, or else the best way to self-destruct, the prettiest red flag to wrap myself up in, then I will forget my discomfort for one moment. I will learn to escape the sadness that my romantic worldview, my longing to connect with others, hasn’t worked out the way I wanted.” As William Goldman himself wrote, “Cynics are simply thwarted romantics.”
When we meet the Man in Black, he is light-years from being naïve. As he summits the Cliffs of Insanity, he is brilliant, so cynical it’s not funny. After all, he’s pretty sure his love has sold out on him for both wealth and comfort. In this space, his wit and sword are both razor-sharp. “Get used to disappointment,” his veritable battle cry before his first sword fight, could be the mantra offered at the start of any meditation retreat, at least if you think the practice might offer some kind of self-transcendence. No matter how much you meditate, you will still be you. If we think we’re going to gain a new, better version of ourselves, how disappointing is the realization that there’s no way to escape who you really are? No matter how much you try to escape your ordinariness, you will never get away from yourself, and as far as any spiritual narrative of blissful transcendence goes, that fact is the ultimate disappointment.
Westley has been hardened by the (perceived) abandonment of his true love, and trained by his Dread Pirate guru, yet his heart remains closed. He is so armored that he even turns sarcastic toward his love, snarkily claiming to have killed Westley himself—“Once word leaks out that a pirate has gone soft…”—and when she tells him to stop mocking her pain, he says the very famous words “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”3
This line is almost the most Buddhist line of the whole film. Almost. But it is off by one word, and the absence of that word illuminates a very common misunderstanding of the Buddha’s teaching on the truth of dissatisfaction, or duhkha. This misunderstanding creates a subtle deviation away from dharma and into nihilism. If Westley had said, “Life includes pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something,” he would’ve been perfectly attuned to reality, grounded in a blend of honesty and compassion, free from the extremes of hope and fear. If, furthermore, he had said, “The attempt to exclude and ignore the inevitability of pain is what causes us to suffer, Highness,” then he would’ve been practically giving a dharma talk.4 But he’s not ready for that. First, this Man in Black must unmask, which rekindles his longing. Then, to overcome the cultural negativity of the kingdom in which he lives, circumstances dictate that he must reincarnate one more time. Westley has to find a way to recover the Farmboy’s belief in true love. And he can’t do it alone.
It’s not Westley’s fault that he winds up in a mostly dead state, just as it’s not our fault that the shattering of hope turns us into trolling cynics who doubt everyone’s intentions and ridicule the goodness of this world. Sometimes the world we have inherited leads our experience into dark corners, from which it is scary to emerge. Just as Humperdinck and Rugen get in the way of true love’s fulfillment, our culture gets in our way, and our path to openness is longer and more winding than we hoped.
Basic Goodness, Recaptured
IN THE SHAMBHALA TRADITION, THERE is one quintessential way to take off your mask, and it is something we do again and again throughout the path, using a variety of personal and interpersonal methods of inquiry. All these methods have one common feature: they each present a messy process of contemplating, questioning, wrestling with, feeling unworthy of, glimpsing, and slowly arriving at a greater trust in the truth of your basic goodness.
There are many ways that basic goodness can be investigated, many synonyms or experiences that can point you toward a meaning that can be only approximated by language. Two main contemplations of basic goodness have helped me reincarnate beyond hope and fear. The first has to do with overcoming the first story line, the need for salvation.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche describes basic goodness as the experience of worthiness. When you inhabit your basic goodness through practice, you feel suddenly confident, worthy of being alive, and willing to just be as you are. You can take up an appropriate amount of space on planet Earth, because you are one of its rightful inhabitants. Claiming your spot on Earth is called “taking your seat” and the meditation posture directly reflects confidence in your worthiness to take up space. Basic goodness is like a passport that verifies your citizenship in the human race.
Feeling unworthy and lacking confidence, not wanting to take up space, presents an unfortunate irony: the less worthy we feel, the more space we tend to take up, because we have to chase a whole bunch of “others” in order to feel like we belong. This is the tragic irony of self-obsession. Worthiness has nothing to do with arrogance or ego. It’s not about misguided attempts to be the “best.” Worthiness is how you overcome the salvation myth and stop being a hungry ghost—you realize that you yourself possess qualities of admiration. When admiration for others and the realization of your own admirable qualities become equal participants in your worldview, that’s when you can really take your seat.
One of the universal characteristics of being an attractive person is appearing as if you don’t need attention. In this world of hungry ghosts, the one who is not chasing any salvation becomes increasingly sought after, because the rest of us wonder what it is you’ve managed to figure out. Sometimes this confidence is misperceived, and you end up attracted to people who aren’t really confident, just distant. One way to project false confidence is to space out completely. The pretense of apathy is a false worthiness, that “I don’t even care so I might not get back to you for a month” state of mind. That’s not confidence; that’s avoidance. Real confidence is how we overcome our story lines of hope.
The other synonym for basic goodness I love to contemplate is this: innocence. What if humans, at our foundation, are innocent of any fundamental wrongdoing? Perhaps this view seems too optimistic. How could we explain Hitler, or police brutality, or, for that matter, a mean-spirited ex-lover, in terms of basic goodness? The Tibetan phrase for basic goodness could also be translated as “original purity.” No matter what mistakes you’ve made, no matter what confusion you have been caught up in, you can always return to your innocence and see things freshly, through the eyes of a child. You can always get back to the source of your humanity, a spring from which there is no fundamental corruption.
Innocence is not some naïveté that pretends there aren’t problems or reasons to be skeptical. Basic goodness is often mistaken for “it’s all good,” some saccharine platitude. We can’t be spoon-fed basic goodness without questioning it, informed as we are by years of remembered let-downs and confusion. And you should question it. Basic goodness is waiting for you to struggle with it, every day. But the voice you use to ask the skeptic’s questions ought to sound like the voice of an intelligent child, not an Internet troll. Each time you meditate, you can take that fresh curiosity and apply it to those same old thought patterns you’re so sick of. Similarly, each time you go to a movie, you need to remember what it felt like to go to a movie theater for the very first time. And each time you connect with a new romantic interest, you could remember what it felt like before you grew jaded by the process of innocently connecting with another human. Seeing every moment as fresh is the only way to conquer the cynic’s fearful narrative.
Here is the riddle of enlightenment in relationships: How could a person move through the world with total savvy, complete confidence that she knows her own experience and won’t be fooled by anyone’s silly games, yet still be curious, perceiving openly with the eyes of a child? Can innocence also be cunning, and vice versa? Can you walk down each street in life knowing you’ve been down this block before, and still walk with a clean gaze and an open heart? You know you’ve seen it all, but you let every new experience be brand-new. This innocent savvy, this middle path between hope and fear, creates the ideal conditions for discovering a healthy relationship.
I believe that a master warrior lives within this riddle. The awakened romantic is never fooled by appearances, but they are curious about what a fresh connection might bring. The only way to move toward this balance is to carefully spot both story lines, the naïve and the cynical. Sometimes you’ll need to unsheath your sword to cut through false saviors, yes, but you also need to move through the world unmasked, with innocence rediscovered.
Coming Back to Life
WHO HELPS WESTLEY WITH HIS final reincarnation? Appropriately, he is brought back to life by the movie’s only example of a successful long-term romantic relationship: Miracle Max and Valerie. Just as every character in this work displays their eccentricities, Goldman’s portrayal of a successful marriage deviates spectacularly from storybook norms. Yet this argumentative pair are the ones responsible for the Farmboy’s miraculous rebirth. It’s almost as if Max and Valerie are saying, “Is this what you want, kiddo? This what you are looking for? A real relationship? With your Buttercup? Do you want all the difficulties and tough times we’ve had, both together and alone? The times we can’t stand each other? The times managing each other’s depression? Do you want a relationship in the trenches? To watch what decades of gravity do to each other’s bodies? You want the disappointments, the arguments, the hair-pulling confusion? Is this what you crisscrossed the seas to find? Here it is, Farmboy, come back and get it. All you have to do is stop being mostly dead. All you gotta do is wake up.” And Westley does.
Is your own story of rebirth ever complete? Is completion even a possibility? Maybe. Or maybe the work will never be done, because the story lines of salvation and cynicism might maintain some hologram-like presence in your thoughts, depending on how your journey proceeds. To get caught up in a story line is as human as getting free of one. Perhaps awakening is not about hope and fear disappearing from the mind. Perhaps it is about those narratives becoming less and less sticky as we recognize them with increasing wisdom. As awareness becomes more prominent, we get caught less often, until our old story lines become friends and confidantes, minor characters and color commentators, rather than demons.
An awakened master uses hope and fear in a new way. A Buddha, I believe, has transformed hope into a kind of aspiration, an intention without expectation. A Buddha has transformed cynicism into a knowing skepticism, never accepting easy answers or prostrating before false idols. In some versions of the Buddha’s life, his inner traps of hope and fear were embodied by the character of Mara, an enticing demon who kept trying to undermine Siddhartha’s self-confidence and discipline. After his complete enlightenment, Mara didn’t disappear from the Buddha’s life. Mara kept on visiting the Buddha, just to say hi, just to have some tea together. I often like to think of my own inner voices of hope and fear as another duo from the 1980s, those good old Muppets in the balcony, Statler and Waldorf.
What does it mean to be brave when you approach relationships? It’s interesting that we use the word warrior in the Shambhala tradition, since in Sanskrit, the word literally means “hero friend,” and the Tibetan literally means “brave one.”5 The not-quite-literal translation “warrior” is an attempt to reclaim the meaning of bravery from those who incite violence, to proclaim the bravery that it takes to overcome confusion. Ideally, being a warrior involves no violence. When, at the film’s conclusion, Westley implicitly tells Inigo that he could become the next Dread Pirate Roberts in his own wacky way, he is describing the pirate not as a person, but as a lineage, as a placeholder identity passed from one warrior to the next. The Dread Pirate is now clearly a tradition of those who share their training through hope, fear, and comedy.
When you open beyond hope and fear, that’s when the warrior is most ready to connect with another person. I have no idea who you will meet when you hold this balance, or if you are even interested in that sort of relationship. I know a lot of people who feel ready to meet someone and still feel somehow marooned in the cosmos. “I’m working so hard to be present and open, but nothing’s working.” I know exactly how that feels. A good relationship comes from more than just your readiness. It’s about timing and connection. There’s not that much you can control, but I do know that if you drop the rom-com story line and unmask your inner cynic, if you contemplate both your worthiness and your innocence, it won’t really matter who you meet. You will be on the way to a more awakened relationship with your own mind, and that’s what matters in the end.
From the first moment you investigate the possibility of a connection with a new person; to the sad rejection of not getting your text returned;6 to the nerve-racking excitement of going on a date, trying to present yourself as a respectable, perhaps even noteworthy, human being; to the establishment of a connection and the anticipation of seeing if it will germinate into something deeper; to the discovery of the animal allergies you do not have in common; to the first aesthetic or political disagreement the two of you have; to things either going somewhere or fizzling into thin air; to conversations about cohabitation; to rearrangements of closets and questions about the compatibility of long-term priorities and desires—every early stage of a relationship is a chance to witness the uncomfortable arising of your hopeful story lines, a chance to simply let them be by choosing to show up and see what happens next. It’s probably a good idea to do a short mindfulness session before a date, to be aware of whatever story lines might be gripping your mind. It’s okay to honor your story line, to bow to it, and then submit it gently for annihilation as you arrive at your date. The path to happiness always involves the death of a story line about what we think happiness means.
I will most likely kill your ideas about relationships in the morning.
Glimpsing that moment beyond hope and fear, you might actually meet someone, if that’s what you want. That part all depends on timing and circumstance. It is certainly possible. As you move through the dance of desire together, you might proclaim your own worthiness to this person, confidently: “With or without you, I am basically good.” Then you might remember your innocence and get curious again: “But with you around, I have this hunch, life may get even better. Could we spend some time together and … just see what happens?”
The moment before you know how they’ll respond is the most awakened moment of all.