***Possibility Of Relationships

A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free…to touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding…they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together and invisibly nourished by it. –A. M. Lindbergh Probably everyone has fallen deeply in love at least once in life. We’ve all had an experience so real, so vivid, so overwhelming, we knew it was the real thing. At that moment, we were in the presence of love. More often than not, however, that powerful experience of love with all its vividness, didn’t last—it became a concept. It seems as if we live only a small percentage of our life in the presence of love, and a large percentage in the concept, or memory, of it. Most of us try to get that experience back when it begins to recede. We begin to strategize. We remember things that worked before. We try to figure it all out. We may try soft music in the background, candlelight just so, tender words. But no matter how hard we try to recapture the experience, it’s just not the same. There is a distinction between being in the presence of love; and the concept or memory of love. (This distinction between the presence of something and the concept of something, by the way, is applicable to many other areas of your life.) In The Landmark Forum, people discover a new possibility of what it means to be human, and from there, what is possible in being related—beyond the options we have inherited, beyond what we already know, beyond what we can strategize or figure out. We discover a possibility of being related independent of our expectations, preferences, or strategies—a dimension more powerful than intentions or circumstance can provide. We discover that we can't dance when we are checking to see if we're dancing. We can't dance when we are comparing our movement to our ideal. We discover that we can’t dance without freedom, we can’t dance by the numbers, we can’t dance by matching our movements to a plan. We only dance by dancing. When we grant this freedom to ourselves and others, the struggle to “get it right” recedes, and what is left is no longer the dancer but the dance. Copyright © 2007 Landmark Education. All rights reserved.n