# To Touch with Mind There is a peculiar ache in wanting to know something without the intervention of hands. The eyes can see, certainly—they gather light and make sense of it—but there remains an unbridgeable gulf between seeing and knowing, between the surface and what lies beneath. We are creatures forever reaching, and yet the reaching itself becomes the obstacle. Consider the simplest act: to touch. A child places a palm against bark and feels the roughness of time, the memory of rain, the slow architecture of growth. The fingers are innocent messengers; they report what they find. But what happens when we wish to touch something that has no surface, something that lives only in the space between thought and utterance? What then? The mind performs its own caress. It moves across ideas as fingers move across skin, seeking entry points, soft places where understanding might take purchase. But there is no texture to a thought, no temperature to an emotion. We are left holding air, convinced we have grasped something solid. Perhaps this is why we speak so much, why we circle the same truths endlessly—we are attempting, through language, to forge a tactile bridge between the interior and the exterior. Words are our hands in the dark. They reach toward things we cannot see, tracing their shapes through description, narrative, argument. And sometimes, if we are lucky or patient enough, our words touch something in another person that resonates as if we had pressed our palms together. The most profound contact often leaves no mark. A glance sustained one moment longer than convention permits. A silence that says what speech cannot. The weight of another's attention upon you like a hand you never saw approaching. We mistake clarity for depth. We believe that to understand a thing is to possess it, to make it ours through definition and analysis. But the deepest knowing is not acquisition—it is a kind of surrender. It is allowing something to move through you without demanding it yield its secrets. To touch with the mind is not to grasp, but to be grazed by understanding, to carry away a warmth that cools slowly, leaving us forever altered by the contact. Perhaps the longing itself is the touch. Perhaps in the reaching, we are already held.

The one I love loves someone else. And that someone else dreams of their own beloved, their own irreplaceable other. Love has always moved in these circles, has always turned upon itself — and perhaps always will.

What is the nature of it? Imagine this: the person I desire holds my hand for a moment, yet even in that brief span, she has perhaps begun — without reason, without knowing — to think of her beloved. The distance between touch by hand and touch by heart! How vast an abyss lies between them.

And if I — if I were to wound myself, bleed myself, torment myself into stepping away, and place her, broken and weeping, into the hands of the one she truly loves — what then?

Then my beloved would be profoundly happy. Then to hold in her embrace the one she has always yearned for would feel like nothing less than conquering the world itself.

Yet in that one intimate moment between them — when she lies with her new beloved, in an hour so tender and still, so unburdened and pure — even then, you would see it: he isn't truly there. Lying with his head on her chest, he suddenly thinks of someone else entirely. It may even be that someone else, living in his thoughts, has given him the very tenderness he now offers her — a romance conjured not for her, but borrowed from another's ghost. This happens often. And though it is a terrible truth for my former love to digest, it is the truth all the same.

Ask him afterward to recall that moment, to speak of it — and he will have nothing to say. Why does this happen?

Because it is an open secret, vast and acknowledged by no one. We all know it in our hearts, yet none of us speak it aloud. We know, and yet we deceive ourselves. We say: *She holds my hand; surely she thinks only of me.* Yet her eyes tell a different story — clear and plain. We see and do not see. We understand and do not understand. We think: *What is the use? Let me believe what comforts me.*

Why? Because what we are speaking of is love. The most precious and most tangled thing in all the world. We would rather live in a beautiful lie. And what is that lie? *The one I love surely loves me in return. The one beside me is surely here because of love.* But there are a hundred reasons why someone stays — and love may not be among them. Or love may be there, and yet...

Here is where most of us, with great cunning, commit this particular folly — and we prepare in advance for the day when we must commit it again. How strange! What a peculiar creature the human being is.

A simple thing: is there any law that says a person can love only one other person? Can the heart be bound, even if we wish it? Most people are wanderers in the heart. If the one you love is such a person, then no matter what you think or believe, they will remain so till the end. Perhaps they seek something you do not possess, or something they have failed to find in you. Then surely they will think of, or pine for, someone else — someone in whom they have found that missing element. There is nothing to be done.

If you wish to be well, you must be well by accepting these things as they are. In this world, there is no such thing as “what ought to be” or “what ought not to be.” What exists is only “what happens” and “what does not happen.” The world is not fashioned after your thoughts or mine; the world is simply itself. To understand it as it truly is, you must step out of the labyrinthine world of personal fancies that your mind has created, and walk the paths of the world to comprehend it.