TOW: Proximity versus Rhythm

You know, I love the beat of a bongo drum.  It's kinda fun, and funky at the same time, and anybody can play it.  It's fun, nice sound.  Friendly, even.

However, no one likes drums that sound right in their ears.  A pounding in your head is not a fun sound or feeling.  It's too close.  You want it to be farther away, so you can enjoy it.


Lately, I have been thinking about what kind of person I am, and what kind of people other people are.  In relationships, we have preferences for how we want to interact with people.  We have needs, wants and desires built around two central vibes, two central rules that govern our lives.  There may be more, but I usually find we want one thing or the other more.

Some people like to describe their relationships in distance.  We have people that are close to us, people that are far away, and we feel best when the people we like best are closest to us.  To these people, relationships are better the more we see these people, interact with them on a daily basis in a meaningful way.


Others, I think, fall into the category of rhythm.  It's not about when we see people, but how.  We want our experiences to make sense in a certain time frame, to a certain drum beat, for people to feel our rhythm and get in sync with the way we do things.  We want life to move at a certain pace with certain kind of relationships.  It's not how far, it's how fast, and whether our relationships fit into our personal patterns.


This is directly related to the philosophy of Heidegger.  Heidegger wrote a really big book called Being and Time.  He talked a lot about space, and time, and what they meant to each other.  To make this completely obtuse to most of my readers, in philosophy terms, it means some of us are more interested in Dasien and some of us more interested in Time.


Or, in Brennan terms, some of us are more interested in Proximity, and some of us in Rhythm.

I have found that deep down inside of me, I'm really all about proximity.  I want to keep those special to me close to me.  I used to be a lot more about rhythm,  But that was when everything was easy; I didn't have a care in the world at the time. 

These days, I find I want to be close to the people I care about, and I want them to be close to me.  We can't always be near the ones we love, but we can find ways to keep them in our lives.  And sometimes, yeah, timing matters.  But more importantly, especially during hard times, all that matters is being together.

Or at least that's what I've been thinking lately.