There is NOW, and there is NOT YET

~ things happen we never expected or dreamt: have their own points or direction and view

I’m not confusing intensity with proof - distance can burnish my imagination until it shines brighter than reality has proven I deserve it, or, if that’s wrong, as I’ve not been eager to admit or boast. But real connection endures and outlasts whatever our imagination concocts.

Because connection has to survive ordinary things: timing, inconvenience, silence, disagreement, logistics, and being fully human in the same place.

But knowing that doesn’t make what exists before then unreal.

It simply means the story isn’t finished.

Many thanks to some close friends reaching out yesterday - great comments like, “A bit of a Musing gusher today, Mr. Kolke”… along with one ‘editor-eagle eye-catch’, thanks RH; and, ‘I particularly liked “So there I stand, one more talking head waving in a field of bearded barley on a hot summer day, …”

Sometimes the impossible-looking doesn’t knock. It writes.

It writes back …

What we want isn’t usually dropped in our laps, though I suspect most of us occasionally wish it were.

It’s a two-way thing, certainly, but somebody has to start it, and my experience is that deliberate, calculated things usually look that way - clumsy, over-thought - and magical moments of connection with people who become important players in our lives there is a convergence of otherwise improbable ingredients that stir up an indescribable potion of this and that, the secret sauce of the secret recipe, none of which are secrets - they’re as common as air and water and a well set table.

Somewhere in all that searching, hoping, imagining, and getting on with ordinary life, we wonder whether the thing we’re looking for is far away, nearby, or perhaps looking for us too. Then, poof. The dream ends. Eyes open. Thirst. Bathroom. Coffee. Morning light making unreasonable demands. Except yesterday morning, reality didn’t feel like the disappointing part after the dream. I began my thinking-and-feeling day reading a love letter from a faraway place, from someone I might otherwise have believed existed only in imagination.

We talk about mind and body as though they operate in separate compartments of a compartmentalized spice cabinet of life. I don’t believe that.

For me, the most intensely alive part of attraction begins between the ears: conversation, curiosity, anticipation, surprise, humour, intelligence, imagination, and that strange recognition when another mind seems tuned somewhere remarkably close to your own frequency.

Distance complicates things, and concentrates them.

When physical presence isn’t available, words have to carry more weight. Thought becomes touch of another kind. Discovery slows down, stretches out, and sometimes becomes more revealing because neither person can skip ahead.

Maybe that’s the sweet-and-bitter part of wanting the candy we can’t have today because it’s behind glass, and the candy store is dark, and we feel it’s so close … we could almost touch it … but not now.

I don’t know whether science can measure all of that. I only know my logic has been badly outvoted.

Have you ever met someone whose mind changed the temperature of the room, even when they weren’t in it?

Some connections begin long before two people occupy the same place.

There is no here or there or anywhere - there is NOW, and NOT NOW, which gives us no tools to make the past, so we need to build the future by dealing with the now, here, and now.