Intimacy

Intimacy is tender immersion, in a moment, a place, a relation; with or without love, with or without intention, but always through a connection luring us to the deep. Touch can be terribly trite or a summons to sensuality. Silence can be utterly boring or an intimate occasion of discovery. Breathing can be perfunctory or a rhythmic reacquaintance with reality. Conversation can be contrived or a soul-kindling luminary. The difference is in the depths. Where life feels easy, there is usually superficiality; steering clear of struggles, hiding from vital questions, and a commitment to the avoidance of any real inner observance. The supreme vice is shallowness, Oscar Wilde realized, the enemy of the intimate, as the fullness of human flourishing is found de profundis, “from the depths,” of suffering, the sublime, and the many and varied shades in between. Surface-level engagements might be more comfortable and uncomplicated, but at the cost of closeness with others, oneself, and our environments. Intimacy by contrast is never distant but deep, a felt immersion in the simplicity or complexity of a happening: the often painful, sometimes beautiful, and always uncertain process of evolving and devolving, learning and unlearning, conceiving and misconceiving our very lives. Intimacy crucially includes not only vulnerability but sensitivity; and not merely sincerity but the darker imperative of authenticity, a whole-person willingness to welcome the depths of an experience, even if that experience was not intentionally chosen in the first place. Accordingly, the most natural opportunity each person has for intimacy is with that unchosen entity called the self. Inherited and beyond your original devising, everywhere you go, there you are: a prospect of the deep and deepening, feeling and knowing, exploring and evincing, a perfectly imperfect opportunity of untold intimacy. Such intimacy can be a thoroughly unsettling experience, however, at first, and deeper in. But do not be afraid. What you will likely discover as you embrace the unsettled self—which is not “a self” at all but a tableau of protean possibilities—is something unspeakably precious, and that you alone can discern.