intimacy, a notion relevant to learning

 

intimacy is not a “dirty word”

Intimacy is often used as euphemism for sexuality, in particular sexual intercourse; and the word has taken on some of the cultural baggage associated with sex.  

Nonetheless, we do know that we have experiences of intimacy with our children, and with friends in intense and open conversation.  Furthermore, we may have a sense of intimacy in playing a team sport, or participating in a musical creation, or even doing something alone.   We may feel we have an intimate connection with place, or with nature.

I claim that intimacy fundamentally refers to our sense about the “quality” of our connection with our world, in whatever domain, with whatever doing, with whatever “other” we are with.  I think it is a human awareness of our structural coupling with our medium.  

Vlad Grigore

ideas touch

qualities or aspects of intimacy

I do not want to pretend that the list I provide is “the way it is” in any sense.  What I have is no more than a set of abstractions that to me appear to be common in all situations of intimacy.  They are also distinctions, and as such they serve to reveal some aspects of the experience.  However, if you take them as “firm” or “real” they may also obscure other aspects, qualities, dimensions, or other relevancies that pertain to your experiences of intimacy.    Just the same, I have found these useful as a way of regarding our engagement with our world, and the deeply biologically engrained pleasure of a close, fitting, and intricate engagement.

in any relationship, whether animate or not

  1. Bulletfit

  2. Bulletintensity

  3. Bulletintricacy

  4. Bulletfluidity

  5. Bulletcoherence

in a relation between living beings

  1. Bulletreciprocity

  2. Bulletflow of emotioning

in languaging beings

  1. Bulletdimensionality, or “richness”

  2. Bulletintegration; or integrity/transparency

  3. Bulletlove and care

  4. Bulletawareness of self and other

  5. Bulletawareness of awareness

Tim Hicks