Dear Pals,
I have a friend who is a poet.
He has written nearly 100 books of poetry.
His words have moved me to raucous laughter and deep weeping. He is one of the finest writers I have ever met. He is a real writer...I am a mere typist.
But, one day at lunch, he said something that really stuck in my mind.
He talked about the Human Touch and it's Power.
He said that he and his girlfriend held hands for an entire day on a recent weekend in Chicago.
He said, "It was remarkable to be conscious of each other in such a connected way."
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that when people are first lovers they hold hands and embrace a lot. The sex is great and frequent. A magical mystical merging of two cleaving into one flesh is the ultimate expression of human creativity and connectivity.
But, as time goes by, as Sam sang in Casablanca, the hand-holding and hugging and cleaving becomes less frequent. A distancing phenomenon begins to occur. Lovers who become couples begin to decouple. They no longer move as one unity, but as two again.
WE reverts from US to become two distinct - Me, Myself and I entities.
Selflessness can become Selfish-centeredness.
It's so subtle that at first the untethering is imperceptible.
Until one day, there is nothing left to hold onto.
The love atom is split!
The manton and the womanton explode with all the devastating power of the D-Bomb.
Here come the helpers: marriage counsellors, psycho-therapists and in many cases, the divorce dividers - lawyers, judges, juries and justifiers for behavior both sides of the equation.
They will make sure the split is split fairly and that someone will pay! Someone has to bear the onus and the blame, unless it's a no-fault divorce. Which of course, they all really are.
After all, who was the one who stopped holding hands? Who's fault was that?
What began with a capital I L O V E Y O U often ends in a whirlwind of recrimination, hate and hostility that endures until death departs the once star-crossed lovers.
Yet like particles in the quantum world they are both still affected instantly across the infinite distances of space by some unseen connectivity. What happens to one instantly happens to the other...no matter how far apart they are.
In physics they call this quantum "particle entanglement."
I call it "Children in the Marriage Cloud field effect."
You see, along the way, the two, who for a time cleaved so eagerly and rapturously to become one flesh have now created other quantum photon particles or light waves - children - who are forever both part of the individual parent particles, as well as, a free radical!
Or in some cases, a free traditionalist. Or if you're really lucky, a free spirit!
Like a photon, the child can be both a particle and a wave. Heisenberg spoke of his Uncertainty Principle where the observer's act of observing actually changes the nature of the object being observed.
I have Birk's Certainty Principle, which states that the child always behaves better when being observed. The closer the observation the better the behavior. But if the child is unobserved inside Schrodinger's Box with his cat...God only knows what's going on!
Here is my personal proof observation of the photon particle/wave phenomenon in action:
A child particle takes a lot of energy from both parents and then waves "Goodbye" as it goes off to create and cleave with the child photons of other parents...but they can never really leave.
They can't because of an entanglement called DNA. DNA is an orderly entaglement...but, an entangelment nontheless.
We are with them always.
Hey Kids! No kidding!!
You are your parents and you are you!
You never really moved out.
We came along for the ride!
Now as I grow older, I sometimes wonder what might have happened, if we had held hands more often and more tightly? And I wonder, who if anyone will be there to hold my hand just before I make the leap through the final curtain?
Curtains!
I also wonder if there will be a "curtain call," when I get to come back for another "do over" in a new, as the rednecks say, "REINTARNATION!"
Birk, Commonsensetarian, Citizen of The Republic
PS: When was the last time you held hands everywhere you went? When was the last time the You and the Her, the He and She walked as one WE in public for even a few minutes?
I wonder what that might feel like?
I can remember what it looked like because WE have a wonderful Weigand life-casting of us holding hands to remind us of what WE looked like...once upon a time.
