Truly, the task of human love is not to give up our exploration or our return. It seems the truth of relationship burns as the fire of our immersion in that pilgrimage back and forth from solitude to community, from spirit to flesh, from intuition to tradition. True relationship marks a kind of immersion into life we both crave and fear. After a lifetime of loving, it never ceases to surprise me how the act of relationship, like inquiry or honest thought, looks so treacherous before beginning, and so inevitable, like gravity, once on the other side.

But on this side, each of us is a blind climber looking for others while listening for the birds along the way. How often I’ve watched the geese discover one by one how hard it is to fly alone, how in the crisp October air they start to form their moving V, because each in aerial wake is boosted by the lift of the one before. And how the lead goose pumps the hardest till he tires and drops to the end where he can coast as another takes the lead. I watch this community of birds share the flight majestically and wonder why I don’t even know my neighbor’s name.

Yet if we dare to act in true relation—if we dare not to rush, not to live any faster than we are ignited from within, if we dare to slow into true presence the many times we do rush, if we dare to hear each other’s needs, if we dare to accept the discomfort of not knowing what to do until it becomes the comfort of a perennial question—we might find that one life in its unmitigated fullness may be more than enough.

We might find, as the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu suggests, that hiding in itself is a great drain until we dare to live in our own skin:

You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you. But if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.

Throughout our lives, we struggle with the temporary ease of hiding and the pain of never surfacing: hiding our feelings of insignificance in our ambitions for a life of fame, hiding our confusions at the complexities of life in principles we hope will swallow them, hiding our pain of honest suffering in a resignation that stills the heart. And all the while our experience of what is real gets away from us.

But if we were to hide who we are in who we are, like hiding a body in its skin, if we were to let things be and not makeover their impact on us, all hiding would evaporate and the constancy of our self would be final, real, and unequivocal in its majesty of flaws.