FootprintsintheWind.com

Martin Buber in I and Thou, at page 99 writes “Love itself cannot persist in the immediacy of relation; love endures, but in the interchange of actual and potential being.” So too conversation keeps on, becoming stronger and weaker, more intimate and less, more Thou and then more It in an interchange. Constant change. Here is where our dismay arises: we are denied continual satisfaction of our need for union with the other.

This last is significant, maybe a key to another inner passage, and bears restating. I get disappointed when our conversation does not leave us with a feeling that we were one with each other. We speak of soul mates and mind melds and these are but hints of what we mean. What Buber is telling us is the truth of experience: we only get these meetings fleetingly, perhaps in a glance. Yet we keep going out, seeking and being open to such meetings, for herein we come alive.

:- Doug.