On Relationships and how they Touch

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A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate, but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of the Mozart’s. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now, arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back—it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it. They joy of such a pattern is not only the joy of creation or the joy of participation, but it is also the joy of living in the moment. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined.

--Anne Morrow Lindbergh