Scent

Sitting in that conference room, listening to this figure at the front talking about asset classes and quantitative easing, clearly insulated from the audience by his own fascination for the subject matter, with people on either side of me and in the row in front, the slight uneasiness that I might be blocking those behind me as I shifted around, bored, uncomfortable, it crossed my mind how our human relationships are really only the appearance of relationships, the invisible joins that we insert between the brief times of actual physical togetherness, the way in which so much of our relationships are in fact off-line, incubated within our own internal worlds until once again enlivened by the next encounter.  The sum total of these interactions glued together privately, and we have a relationship over time, much like Osho’s analogy of sequential thoughts creating the illusion of a mind, a “crowd” of people.  And so, the question for me is how these two things are connected; the actual, precise encounter and the off-line, private, internalized dialogue and remembrances between the encounters?  Perhaps there are just the dislocated moments of physical togetherness.  The voice on the phone, the sheen on the hair, the scent of skin, the eyes, the warmth….an exercise of dot-to-dot, with nothing going on between, no relationship at all over time but rather many separate, momentary togethernesses, divided forever by the uncrossable rolling seas of our imagination.