Relationship or Relating

by Kevin Nixon

A relationship is finite; whereas relating is a continuous action.

Say the two words to yourself, slowly. Meditate on them. Don’t think about them but rather feel how they resonate in your being.

Ok first, re-la-tion-ship. What is your first impression of this word? Does it seem alive or does it have a quality of death to it. To me, relationship infers that you have reached a point which you cannot go beyond. It carries with it a feeling that says you are here and you can know longer go over there. It almost gives one the feeling of being in a cubicle.

Now say the word re-lat-ing. Does it not have a quality of the infinite in it? Does it not have a quality of continuous discovery in it? Does it not hold the possibility of the new in it?

It is because we have taken what is supposed to be a dynamic quality (relating) and transformed it into a static quality (relationship) that our interactions with one another (whether married, friends, parents to children, etc.) have become stale, unfulfilling. At some point, we begin to take the other for granted. We convince ourselves that we know the other. But I say to you that you can never truly know another person. You can become familiar with another’s habits. But familiarity with another's habits is not the same as knowing them.

The human being craves difference. He wants spontaneity, but he also wants predictability. The problem arises when the pendulum swings too far in either direction. For far too long, the pendulum has been stuck in the arena of predictability. By predictability I mean that the way we relate to one another is based on old, worn out and rusted mental models, models that have been around for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. It is like a recording being played on a gramophone; when the music stops for one generation, someone cranks the handle and the same recording gets programmed into the new generation’s psyche, so that each generation simply repeats the errors of the previous generation, until finally, someone gets fed up and decides to go contrary to the status quo. And thus, chaos is born.

The old begins to die. It is a long, slow death; for there are those who remember the old and want to hold onto it. But the new must have its time. And so, the gramophone gives way to the CD player.

Human beings are constantly growing and changing, in all aspects, mentally, physically and spiritual. Today, the human being often takes quantum leaps in personality and character- meaning that a person may make significant changes in their being in as short a period as 24 hours. For example, nowadays we see that many people are changing their eating habits. A person can go to bed a meat eater and wake up a vegan or a person who once thought of meditation as hokey-pokey can now be found swaying to the chant of OM.

A desire for personal fulfillment is rainy down upon the earth plane and it is global; the fact that this desire is global demands that we transcend the old relationship models; for it is fast becoming a way of existence that a person on the path of self-fulfillment will no longer allow him self or herself to be derailed by the fixed thought patterns of another.

It is said that relationships take hard work and I guess that this true, but, in my opinion, only because the people in the relationship have become fixed. The person who is open has no fixed perception of the other and is therefore always and never surprised. Such a person is in a constant state of relating. And, it is with this person that love has no conditions.