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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had a coffee date this morning with a man I was matched with through an online dating site. I had mixed feelings about the whole idea, which is why I wrote about it in the first place. I was touched greatly by the number of responses that post garnered, and am very grateful for having your precious attention to my little situation. Thank you sincerely for taking the time to write.
So, let me say right away that it was an enjoyable morning. We met at a little French bistro not too far from where I live, which is a place I go often. They have, as you might expect, coffee in the true French style and baguettes to match with unsalted butter and divine preserves. So I felt comfortable. I advise this for anyone thinking of where to go for a first coffee date: go wherever you are most comfortable. Don't go somewhere you've never been before. Why stress yourself out further?
Our conversations went to photography: it turns out that the man who enjoyed Pillars of the Earth also knows my favorite Gothic cathetdral well (La Sainte Chapelle in Paris) and has taken many photos there.
(For a number of reasons, the conversation didn't get to the point where I might have told him that the critical scene in the one novel I've had published took place in that cathedral as both main characters met while taking photos of the light through the stained glass windows.)
We talked about traveling back to your home town after many years. We talked about our children. We talked about Seattle, about his work, about my graduate studies and internship.
I had decided to stay one hour, because I had to go somewhere else this afternoon but also because I just wanted today to be a taste. If the buzz was going to start, one hour would be enough time for it to set its seed.
We left on cordial terms, with his promise to locate his Paris photos (no small task) and send them to me.
I walked about a block through the Seattle mist to my car. I tried to identify what was coursing through my body. I knew it wasn't lust. (The merits and disadvantages of making such a quick decision about this can be picked up in a separate conversation for another time, perhaps; for now I'll just say I knew I was not instantly struck with a chemistry pow! of a shudder that happens when a good blast of lust strikes me.)
I do believe our bodies know things before, and beyond the scope available to, our minds. If we are quiet and listen, we can learn a great deal about ourselves by locating that body sensation (Eugene Gendlin, father of Focusing, calls this the Felt Sense). The next step is to attach a word to it that comes as close as possible to describing it. Spend some time with this part. When you find the right word, you experience a shift of sorts in your Felt Sense, and that's how you know what's really going on with you. The mind is not to be trusted until later, because you can think yourself into just about anything (as we all well know), such as I'm in love, or I can't stand this guy, etc., or other rash judgments. Let your body tell you what is going on. I've learned to trust mine.
This morning my Felt Sense equated to the word amusant (due more to the conversation than any great fluency in French). This word, amusant, told me I had just met someone interesting to talk with, and it was much like the way you feel when after serendipitously sitting next to someone on an airplane whose conversation captivates you after you've discovered you have something quite particular in common (same remote hometown, same undergraduate university, or, in my case, photography in a Parisian cathedral). Part of the reason this experience is such a lovely thing is that you know it's time-limited and fortuitous: you seize the moment in full awareness that it will pass.
The really interesting part of the day came later, though, on my way home from a new writers' group I joined and whose first meeting I attended this afternoon. In the car afterward, I was exhilarated. The thrill and challenge of meeting a group of like-minded people, who share an interest, a passion, a goal--that's what gave me the Felt Sense of belonging. Belonging!
As Gendlin predicts when a Felt Sense is accurate, there was a profound shift in me after this. It is leading me to give more thought to being and less to doing, in that my happiness and well-being are more tightly linked to who I am than to what I do.
I am a writer.
If I meet someone through my writing and we have enough between us to carry things to the level of commitment to one another, so be it, and what a blessing.
If not, I am not going to pursue dating as a topic unto itself. In other words, I'm not going to do dating. I'm going to be me.
Ah--the Felt Sense on that one? Contentment.
John Lennon got it right when he said that life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. I think falling in love is what happens when you're busy doing other things.
And those other things come from being who you are.
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