Connection and the rapture of living

Vulnerability is key for connection and bliss

Photo by Nguy Tan, Unsplash. I thought it lovely.

Connection provides meaning.

Without it, we are adrift.

I love a Helen Keller quote. As you know, at the age of 19 months, she was struck deaf, dumb and blind.

“[I knew] only darkness and stillness…My life was without past or future…But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart lept to the rapture of living.”

Hellen Keller functioned in what she described as a foggy presence on a dark sea until the moment she felt connection with another human being.

Someone pressed their hand into hers.

That someone made letters by moving their fingers. At that time she didn’t yet understand these were letters, letters made words, and words described feelings.

This was to come.

It was the connection she remembered.

Lost in an unimaginably long forever night, she suddenly emerged into the light and felt a rapture of living.

Connection made it possible.

The only experience I had similar was for weeks, being on the edge of life and death in a hospital intensive care unit, oblivious to the world around me, trapped in a dark world or room. I marvelled I somehow seemed to be alive and could think. But I’d been transported to somewhere dark, black, endless, with activity around me and affecting me that didn't make sense. Time didn't seem to matter there. I didn’t know if the experience would continue forever, or would, at some point, end.

Meanwhile, I was unaware my wife refused to leave the hospital. For two weeks she slept on a chair beside my bed. The doctors had given her the talk.

You’ll have to do things on your own now.

You’ll have to learn to be by yourself now.

Slowly I came to, aware my hand was being held.

I could not move or speak, but I was aware the void was gone.

After being adrift, lost, in a dark unfeeling world, I felt connection.

It would be unimaginable to me to have this experience so early in life, like Helen Keller, with no landmarks at all while seemingly forever adrift, trapped in a shapeless black world void.

Keller didn’t understand her place in space, or how she related to everything or anyone.

That is at the extreme of being vulnerable.

Lost.

Hopelessly adrift.

It took a very long time, with the persistence of a very determined teacher, for Keller to understand there were words for things, for space, even feelings.

It came to her like a lightning bolt of understanding.

Suddenly Helen demanded to know what were the words for everything around her.

Helen felt connection.

How vulnerable must we first be to experience the bliss of connection?

It is difficult to be vulnerable.

Some have had it imposed upon us.

Only after do we understand being vulnerable- sometimes hopelessly so- opens a  door to a bliss of connection and a rapture of living.