I had some “dolce far niente” time at the airport yesterday and was reflecting on connection.
It started with thinking about dancing.
I recently began dancing Forró, and I noticed that many kinds of connection can exist between two people within the space of a dance.
The dance may be fun and imaginative, and the bond can arise from the enjoyment both people find in it. It can be the closeness that comes about from being physically near. It can be a song I particularly like, and in some way dancing to it with a certain person has a wonderfully flowy feeling. It might even come down to something as simple as a person’s smile or their joy in dancing.
And then the song ends.
You thank one another and then leave. You might dance again or you might not. But the connection in that moment was genuine.
And that made me wonder: What exactly am I connecting to?
Because I started to feel there is a distinction between connecting with a person and connecting through an experience.
I can have a beautiful dance with somebody that I only just met. I can still experience intimacy, trust, playfulness, or a sense of flow with them. Yet I don’t really know who they are. I don’t know how they behave when difficulties arise. I don’t know their values, their history, their fears and joys, or the hundreds of little things that make them who they are.
That feels very different from the connection I have with the people I truly love — such as my partner, my family, and my close friends. With them, it isn’t only about how I feel in a particular moment. I love them. Their personality, their character, their soul, or whatever we want to call the particular thing that makes a person who they are.
So maybe some connections focus mostly on the person, while others center on the shared experience between two people.
One is no less real than the other. To me, that final point seems important.
A short dance isn’t automatically superficial just because it lasts a few minutes. I don’t have to know the person well for the connection in that moment to have been real. Nor do I have to make it last forever to show it mattered.
That insight also made me think about attraction differently.
Sometimes I feel drawn to someone, and I’ve started wondering:
Is it really the person?
Or is it the kind of experience I connect with them?
Maybe someone makes me feel playful or sensual or adventurous or desired or feminine or free, or they stir up a certain kind of aliveness in me. And because they seem to be the source of that feeling, it is easy to think:
I want this person.
But what if sometimes what I really mean is:
I would like to experience this sort of feeling more.
Or even:
I would like to have greater access to this part of myself.
I really like that question since it doesn’t diminish the reality of the attraction; it only makes me more curious about what is actually happening.
Forró has turned out to be a rather good place for me to explore this. With one person I can feel a sense of closeness, with another a ridiculous playfulness, and with yet another a beautiful musical flow—and then I can go home perfectly happy, without any of those moments needing to develop into something more.
For context, my boyfriend and I are in an open relationship. That isn’t really what this piece is about, but it matters here because sometimes I have felt the desire for experiences outside my relationship.
Since I started dancing, that desire has shifted.
And that surprised me.
Not because anything about my relationship or my views on openness fundamentally changed. I simply started wondering whether I had misunderstood what I was looking for.
Maybe it wasn’t necessarily another person, or even the physical experience itself.
Maybe part of what I was craving was simply the experience of feeling connected.
Perhaps in certain instances I have been seeking a variety of people whereas what I really wanted was a variety of experiences.
Or, even more simply:
Maybe I just want more ways of being alive.
MORE WAYS OF BEING ALIVE
I know that I am an experience-oriented person. Experiences make me happy. I have understood that about myself for a long time.
And it shows a lot in the way I live.
I travel, I go surfing, and I change jobs and businesses. I love to spend time with my family and friends.
Some of my friends are spread all over the world, and I might see some of them once every year while others perhaps only once every five years. Yet whenever we meet again, I feel extremely happy that this person is part of my life.
For me, continuity does not have to be the criterion of importance.
Something doesn’t have to last forever, or even be present in my everyday life, to matter.
Perhaps meaning can build up in various ways.
For some people, it might build up through continuity—such as staying in the same place, having long-standing relationships, pursuing a career over many decades, and knowing a community well.
For me, much of my meaning comes from experiencing various places, people, projects, cultures, adventures, and versions of myself.
In my opinion, neither appears more profound.
They are simply different ways of experiencing a life.
And perhaps that is why I like the idea that I don’t have to possess an experience for it to count.
There is no need for me to turn a beautiful dance into a phone number.
Or to turn chemistry into something more.
I don’t need to turn friendship into one of constant contact.
Or to turn a wonderful place into a permanent home.
I can fully experience something and still let it come to an end.
Somehow these thoughts led me away from dancing entirely and into a question I’ve thought about many times before:
How do we decide what life to live?
I know some people—and I can say that I’ve experienced it too—who ask, „Where should I live? What should I do? Which life is the right one?“
Someone might be living in Portugal and wondering whether Portugal is really THE place. Or if it’s Bali, or somewhere else.
And I started thinking: maybe the question itself makes things unnecessarily difficult.
Rather than asking myself, „Is this the place where I should live?“, what if I instead asked:
What actual value does this place offer me?
Can I do the things I love here?
Are there people I connect with?
Can I do work that matters to me?
Which of my needs and values does this place meet?
Which doesn’t it meet?
And am I okay with that?
All places have advantages and disadvantages, and so do all jobs, lifestyles, and relationships.
There is probably no configuration in which everything lines up perfectly.
Freedom may clash with security. Adventure may clash with stability. Novelty may clash with continuity. Living near the ocean could mean that I end up farther from the people I love.
A good decision may not eliminate all of those tensions.
Maybe it is one where I understand the trade-offs and can say:
Yes. Those are the ones I am willing to live with.
It’s not something new to me. I haven’t expected certainty from life for a long time, and I know I can’t know whether a choice will still be right in five or ten years.
But something about this exploration made me see the implications more clearly.
If I accept that I cannot have certainty, why keep asking my choices to prove themselves as if I could?
Why ask:
Is this the right place?
When perhaps the more useful question is:
Can I make a choice about this now since there is enough that is important to me?
Not „enough“ in the sense of settling.
Or: Well, I suppose this will do.
But something more deliberate:
This gives me much of what I deeply value, though it has some limitations. I am aware of them, and knowing that, I still choose it.
And then I live what I chose.
Because there is a difference between endlessly evaluating a life and participating in one.
THE UNFAIR ADVANTAGE OF THE UNLIVED LIFE
There will almost always be some other option.
Another country.
Another job.
Another way of structuring my life.
Another person.
And some of those alternatives would probably be better in some aspect.
Eight billion people live in this world. Of course there is someone somewhere with whom I could also fall deeply in love. Maybe someone would be more compatible with me in one way, more exciting in another, and share another interest.
But I’ve started to feel that this is simply not a very interesting question anymore.
Because I can never compare my actual life with those other hypothetical lives.
The only thing I can do is to compare reality with imagination. And imaginary lives have a very unfair advantage:
They don’t have inconveniences yet.
The hypothetical place is free from annoying bureaucracy, the hypothetical career hasn’t become repetitive, the hypothetical relationship hasn’t experienced its first major conflict, and the person with whom I haven’t built a life doesn’t include ordinary Tuesday mornings, misunderstandings, bad moods, incompatible needs and years of accumulated complexity.
Possibility is frictionless.
Reality isn’t.
Maybe there is a stage at which keeping on asking ‚Could there be something better?‘ doesn’t make us more discerning.
It just keeps us looking.
This idea has taken on special significance for me in the context of my relationship.
Not because I suddenly discovered that commitment doesn’t require certainty. I’ve believed that for a long time. But because I realized something slightly different:
I don’t need to know whether there is a better relationship somewhere in the world to participate in the one I have fully.
There is no need for me to prove that my boyfriend is the best possible person for me among the eight billion people.
It is anyway an impossible comparison.
I can ask something much more real:
Given the way I know this person, given the relationship that exists between us, do I really want to be here?
And yes.
Very much.
There’s a pleasant sense of liberation in that.
Instead of scanning an imaginary horizon, I can look at the person in front of me.
Who is he?
What is it about him that I love?
What exists between us?
What can I give him?
What can we still create and experience together?
And perhaps choosing someone is partly what allows a relationship to become what it can become.
Because a relationship isn’t something I can only stand outside of and evaluate. I am part of it. What I bring to it changes it.
There is a difference between asking whether I have found a good relationship and participating in creating one.
Strangely, the various thoughts I’ve had about connecting with other people have made me feel closer to my boyfriend than farther away.
I find that fascinating.
Forró has shown me that connections can be very plentiful; I can experience intimacy, playfulness, joy, or a sense of flow with different people.
Rather than making my relationship feel less special, it has helped me understand more clearly what makes it special.
A beautiful connection with someone else might say:
Spending this moment with you is beautiful.
But with my boyfriend, it’s different.
I know him.
I love him for who he is.
We have a history, trust, affection, attraction, knowledge of one another, shared memories, private meanings, and this particular world we have created together.
Another person might give me another beautiful experience.
But they aren’t him.
And somehow I don’t need him to be the only person with whom I can experience connection for that to be true.
In fact, knowing that connection is possible elsewhere may make the choice more meaningful.
I don’t choose you because you’re the only person with whom connection is possible.
I choose you knowing that connection is possible everywhere.
MY MOUNTAIN
One more image stayed with me: A while ago, I had an interesting conversation with someone, and he talked about his wife and his child, calling them his mountains.
He said he loves his mountains and to come back to them.
I liked that immediately, because I already thought of my boyfriend as my rock — as something steady in my life, a safe place, a center from which I can venture out and explore.
But somehow the image of the mountain put that feeling into words even better.
A mountain is solid. It is always there, and you can orient yourself by it. And you don’t have to spend your whole life sitting on it, and it will still be your mountain.
You can travel far away, explore completely different landscapes, and experience all kinds of things elsewhere.
It remains your mountain.
That is very much how I experience my relationship. My boyfriend is my rock, my mountain and my safe place. A point from which a whole life may unfold. This is perhaps especially meaningful to me because I value freedom, movement, and exploration so much.
It’s easy to see rootedness and freedom as opposites. Yet I do not see them that way. If anything, that center lets me venture out more freely.
I can travel, surf, dance, meet people, and have friends all over the world. I can try new things, change jobs, explore places, and experience versions of myself.
All of this because I know where my mountain, my center, is.
There is an important difference between a boundary and a center.
A boundary says:
This is how far you can go.
A center says:
This is the place where I consider myself to belong.
And all of a sudden what might appear contradictory from the outside — a desire for both a deep partnership and a great deal of freedom — no longer seems contradictory to me.
And there are different kinds of freedom.
There is:
I am free because nothing holds me.
And then there is another kind that resonates with me much more:
I am free because I know what holds me.
Not holds me in the sense of restricting me.
Holds me as in supports me.
And maybe that is where all these thoughts have taken me.
At first, I wondered why it might sometimes feel so intimate to dance with someone I hardly know.
Then I wondered whether connection is always a matter of the individuals involved, or whether it can sometimes be about what happens between them in a particular moment.
This made me think about whether attraction is always about wanting someone, or whether sometimes we actually want the feeling, the experience, the part of ourselves that comes alive in their presence.
And from there the question became much bigger, venturing into life:
How often do we confuse the thing we believe we want with what we really hope to experience through it?
A person.
A place.
A job.
A lifestyle.
The more clearly I understand the things which make me feel alive and those values which are important to me, the less I shall need life to provide a single perfect answer.
I can choose, and I can experience.
I can let some things be temporary without making them meaningless, and I can let other things become solidly anchored without asking them to contain every possible experience.
I can be fully somewhere without declaring it as my forever home.
And I can love someone wholeheartedly without needing to prove that no other beautiful possibility exists.
A meaningful life might not be one in which we finally find THE person, THE place, THE career or THE configuration that makes us stop wondering forever.
But it could be a life in which we understand what matters to us well enough to choose, and then allow ourselves actually to be where we have chosen to be.
For me, at least, that means having a center while also living out a very large life around it.
I do not choose my partner because he is the only person with whom connection is possible.
I choose him because I love who he is.
He is the relationship I want to fully participate in. My rock. My mountain. The center from which I want to venture out and experience all the other ways of being alive.
My commitment to him doesn’t make my world smaller.
It gives me a place from which my world can become very large.
And those were my musings about connection… What the mind does when it gets some free time 😉
