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December 2007 
The Desire to Touch
Vanessa
I had a mysterious sadness arise as I was shelving books at the library today. A kind of inexplicable yearning that was first caused by looking through a book on past Egyptian societies and art and then was amplified by a stranger who smiled at me as she passed by in silence.
A profound well of sadness filled the air around me while a warm roll of laughter seemed to be cooling the pain somehow from within. It may seem strange, but the sadness came from a sudden awareness of all the people in the world that I would never get to know. All the people who had lived in the past and those who will live in the future as well as all the strangers who live amongst me right now in my own lifetime whom I will never have the chance to know, to touch, or to share intimate connection with.
As an individual caught in the relative equation of time-space it is true that I spend most of my waking life relatively focused on my own ideas, my own life and the unique way in which I see the world. But it is truly, for me, those continual moments when people meet you and poke through you that make it really worth being alive. Those moments when the silence grabs me from behind someone else's eyes and once again demolishes everything I think I know about who they are. When I come to that rush of being truly able to love someone because I choose to let them go. In those daily reflections that stream past me as I take the crowded (and stinky) 45 bus to school everyday; each look, each face reminding me not to forget what this really is, who I really am.
What is it about others that is so beautiful that it makes us want to annihilate ourselves over and over again? The pain and joy of our own separation, both at once arising from the feeling of loss for what we will never get to touch, and yet the deepest knowing that we always already are.
Ah, kankodori,
Deepen thou
My loneliness.
-Zen Haiku
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Wow, I’ve actually been there…here…whatever. I’ve felt the sadness of the never-to-be-known. Interesting… Just realized my choice of words about “where” we are…Connectedness?
For all the people and cultures that have been, and all that will be, there seems to be a semantic change in the terms “know” and “touch” that got me through it. Since the now is made from the intersecting coordinates of times past, just the fact that we’re here, is the touch of them. The personalities, emotions that we see and feel echoes of an evolutionary path all of us are sharing in common.
The more things change, the more they stay the same…I feel that the more we know ourselves and those around us, deeply, the more we really do know those others that time brings into focus.
I dunno, just my initial reaction to your words. Thanks for reminding me of those moments.
You know, I used to bitch about living in NYC. Lately, I’m in love with it. One of the reasons is that there are millions of people I see only once in my life every day. I walk down a busy street and look at people, and I become them.
And the sadness is swept away.
Because I live their life for a fragment of time - only to realise that we are all one.
It took me a long time to come to this place. But I am here now. And its amazing.
My cat died last week - I cried. Mostly for my sadness of missing her. She’s probably floating out there somewhere, looking at the next life she’d like to take on.
A lifetime is but a day. Tomorrow you might be a man in Azerbaidjan. :)
Rainbows,
Katya
Ah, sharing those moments of simple recognition with an “other”, truly beautiful.
A living moment that allows us to touch with all that ever was and all that ever will be as well as the recognition that not a single step has ever been taken and that there was never really anywhere to go. It is a beautiful place to be, the loss of self in a million forms; and the arising play of Spirit’s mysterious movement splashing waves over the emptiness.
Thanks for sharing the moment guys(-:
What is it about others that is so beautiful that it makes us want to annihilate ourselves over and over again? The pain and joy of our own separation, both at once arising from the feeling of loss for what we will never get to touch, and yet the deepest knowing that we always already are.
yes, i love the way you have captured the sense of the loss, of that which we cannot know, the richness that we miss, moment to moment…
and the yearning to return - to shed the separation of skin and return to the ocean of being
…
the other pole for me is the need at times to be deeply alone
Yes its weird, I find my deepest desire to touch actually arises out of my deepest Aloneness. I guess I could call them times of “lonliness” thus why I used the Zen Haiku at the end but its a lonliness that opens the beauty of Aloneness or Oneness.
I guess that is also the paradox for me; the desire to touch and yet the ultimate emptiness inherent in the act of touching or grasping beauty at any location.
Oh and yes, to shed the separation of skin and return to the ocean of being. This is the essence of my relative heartache. Thank you for articulating it so beautifully…
http://www.geoffolson.com/page5/page11/page47/page47.html