I think that “connection” is a kind of all-inclusive metaphor for a lot of different feelings. Some of those feelings are hormonal—you smell right to the other person; some of them are in the nature of a story: you identify with the story someone else tells… you feel like your stories are the same; some of them are energetic—you get this sense of a person’s “energy”—the way they interact with the world; the way they seem to think or flow. There is an actual physical component of this, because we can feel another person’s anger or calmness or jitteryness. These feelings send (for lack of a better word) an energy into the environment that we pick up without words. You can tell when someone is angry or happy. We just feel it. What we are feeling and how we are feeling it, I don’t know. But most of us can feel these things.
Connections can be positive or negative, but I think most people talk about positive connections. These can be made up of all kinds of similarities—political points of view, taste in movies or books or favorite sports or other pastimes.
I do not believe “connection” is magic or unexplainable. I do think its not very precisely defined so that it means different things to different people. I think that sex is one of the most powerful connections because it is usually filled with emotion, and is usually very charged and very intense. When we have sex with someone, we are usually strongly focused on that person.
I think it is the intensity of focus, not matter what activity you are doing with the person, that defines the strength of the connection. When you want to be near or with a person in a social or emotional way, it is largely because feel a strong connection with them—a connection that is based on many different factors.
Personally, I don’ think it’s a big deal. I think it happens often. Calling it a connection may add a little bit of panache to it, or may make it seem special, but it’s specialness is not in the fact that we feel it. We all feel these things to one degree or another. Positively or negatively.
What is special is who you feel it with, and how you feel it. So much goes into it, that we have to call it intuitive. We are navigating thousands of different factors all at once. It is not something we can handle consciously. It is something that only our subconscious brains can handle.
I have different senses of connection with different people. My sense of connection with my wife is different from that with my friends or with fellow musicians or dancers, or fellow members of a crowd or an audience.
Some of these connections feel extremely powerful—life changing. Some make me question what the hell I’ve been doing all my life. Some are much less of a deal than that. You never know when you’re going to meet someone who will change your life dramatically.
