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Intimacy
We are in an interesting state around intimacy. We are all LONGING for more closeness and connection in our lives. We yearn for it and are terrified of it at the same time. As we‘ve attempted to legislate and quantify (for good reasons initially) the WAYS in which we can be in closer connection with each other, we‘ve created so much confusion. Intimacy has become a scary, scary word. It‘s actually INAPROPRIATE to have intimacy in many workplaces. I think they mean sex?? My sister, who teaches second grade tells me that there are rules against intimacy between a student and a teacher. I think they mean touching???
Webster‘s defines intimacy as the state of being intimate. Okay. At first glance this seems to be completely unhelpful. However, after giving the matter some thought, I‘m inclined to agree with Webster completely.
Intimacy isn‘t an event or a thing; it is a state or condition that arises when we are able to be present with another…Right. Intimacy is a condition that arises when we are able to be present with and include what IS. In the other. In ourselves.
Relationship is at the center of everything we do and yet so often we try to be in relationship with the person that we think SHOULD be there, rather than the person who is actually there. Intimacy comes when we can include all that is there and remain connected around something larger than our disagreements or mismatched parts.
Lt. Col. George Kimsey a few months before he died.
My father has been my greatest teacher about intimacy. Growing up, I adored my father and also insisted on adoring the thing that I NEEDED to be there rather than the things that truly were there. He was in the Air Force, a military man from the peak of his pressed cap to the toes of his spit shined shoes and he felt it was his duty and his obligation to shape me up. It‘s what he knew. His fall from grace, the realization that he was very human and therefore imperfect, was traumatic for me.
As I grew older, I began to realize and accept my father‘s limitations and faults and love him, not in spite of them, but because of them. His way of loving may not have looked like I thought it should. It might not have been as consistent or clear or encompassing as I thought it needed to be. Maybe it felt like I only got a tea cup of love and I needed an ocean. What I came to realize was with that tea cup of love, I got the WHOLE cup.
Three years ago, my dad passed away. My two sisters and I got to spend the last three days of his life with him. It was a truly spectacular life changing experience.
On the one hand, what we were experiencing was extraordinary. On the other hand, nothing unusual was happening…a family in the process of loving someone over to the other side. It is those moments of realness and presence in which we must first rely on the interdependence and intimacy that is always there and then we are able to open ourselves to the experience of feeling it.
KKH
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bethfollini
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karenkh
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