A few days ago I wrote about something Andrew Huberman said about learning.
Remember that childhood game where one person holds their hands underneath yours and tries to slap the tops of your hands before you can pull them away?
That moment when you're waiting for them to move?
You're completely there.
Focused. Watching. Feeling.
Huberman's point was that that's the quality of attention that helps us learn.
And I've been thinking:
What if that's also the quality of attention required for a great relationship?
I've been taking a course on Black Holes & Relativity with Dr. Brian Keating.
And relativity contains a beautiful idea:
Where you stand matters.
Two observers can experience the same event differently depending upon their frame of reference.
Welcome to marriage. 😂
We get into trouble when we stop observing the person in front of us and start interacting with the person we think is there.
“I know what you mean.”
“I know why you're doing that.”
“I know what you need.”
Maybe.
But maybe you don't.
And this gets even more interesting when we talk about polarity.
Masculine and feminine aren't substitutes for attention.
They're ways of noticing differences, energies, desires, tensions and attractions actually happening between two people.
You don't learn polarity by deciding what your partner is supposed to be.
You learn it by paying attention.
Like you're waiting for those hands to move.
Present.
Curious.
Responsive.
Focus changes what you can perceive.
What you perceive changes how you relate.
And how you relate changes the relationship.
Apparently studying black holes can make you better at marriage.
Who knew?
P.S. I created the image using ChatGPT with a variety of prompts designed to get the feel I wanted. Some images take lot of reiterations (which can be frustrating, as their image creator has some problems actually following specific instructions.) But this one came easier than most.