Isn’t this the paradox of true relationship? Isn’t this the duet that earnest lovers ultimately play? Aren’t we—in the dynamic of true intimacy—facing instruments butting up against each other? Isn’t life an endless flow of moments that move between us like notes on the same page? Don’t we experience the same things differently? Don’t I always in my innocence and in my adherence to my own perception play back what happens to you upside down? Don’t you in all sincerity play my joys and pains in a way that seems to reverse my intentions and reactions? Yet don’t we play the same events, thoughts, and feelings together? Don’t we, despite our struggles to be understood or understanding, don’t we play The Table Duet? Don’t we, through love, eventually understand each other? Don’t we, through deep listening, turn noise into music? Don’t we, by adding our voice, complete each other’s story?

So who will live your life in relationship? If all we do is aim to please, we abdicate our capacity as a facing instrument and merely echo the stronger voice among us. Unable to withstand this struggle, many lovers either mirror their dominant partners or live alone. As in intimacy, so too in society: many citizens either abdicate their individuality by mirroring the wants of their culture or they withdraw into a self-imposed exile, living as a hidden warrior in a land of conformity.

Often, we experience our quests for personal truth and intimate attachment as opposing drives. For each human being, in pursuit of what it means to be alive, finds and climbs their mountain, again and again, like Moses, not sure what they’ll find going up or coming back down. Yet in this journey into consciousness, into experience, into meaning and back to where we live, in this endless sojourn of exploration and return lies the test of our human greatness. For the masters, in love and art, whoever you think they are, are such because they do not cease to climb and seldom fail to bring the climb home.

And each trip takes longer by virtue of our growth. The longer the climb, the farther and more arduous the journey down and back. One reason the mystical poet William Blake is not fully understood is that he stopped coming back. By the Prophetic Books, he turned and kept climbing, never to return. In contrast, Wordsworth and Emerson spent more time at the foot of the mountain harking than climbing, which, in part, explains their attraction to Coleridge and Thoreau, who always stayed on the uninhabited side of the climb.