Before my flight to Colorado, I decided to check out the airport bookstore. Apparently boredom is the mother of growth, because I decided to read something that was, at first glance, a bit denser. I bought a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and I've already finished it. Fairly recently I bought a copy of Freakonomics, another interesting bit of non fiction which talks about practical and interesting day to day applications of economics. But I digress.

Blink talks about the concept of "thin slicing" a given situation in order to get a profound concept of it, an even better one than if you spent a long time trying to understand it. One of the more interesting examples is that of a psychologist who is able to view a 10 minute video of couples talking about the state of their relationship indirectly, and be able to determine with a 95% certainty if they will be together in 15 years.

Another interesting topic was facial expressions, and how people sometimes use microexpressions (small or over a super short time frame) which can betray what's going on at a deeper level. Conversely, one can actually use a series of facial expressions in order to induce certain emotional states in one's self.

Basically, the book is about showing that intuition is powerful, how intuition can lead us astray, and how to hone our view of the thin slice of reality that we are given in order to make meaningful and accurate conclusions. In fact, many times a thin slice (such as looking at someone's bedroom) is more useful than a thick slice (being friends with someone over a period of time).

There's one example at the beginning of the book where a fake ancient Greek sculpture which was "scientifically proven" to be authentic, and yet was intuitively decided to be fake by cursory glances of experts in the field, despite their not being able to say why. The unconscious mind is powerful, to be able to use it fully would be an amazing thing.

In tango, connection can be intuitive, and sometimes one can very quickly connect with another person. The same could be said about relationships. Have you ever instantly known that you were going to like and trust someone for a long time? Perhaps you only knew them for a short while, but it seemed like you had known them your whole life, as if there were a timeless connection between you and them? I wonder if, as you read this, you can remember that feeling, and how wonderful it was. Sometimes life has a means of making us remember those things, prior to discovering that we can experience those feelings again with someone. We simply must be open to it on an intuitive level.

For me, I don’t think that kind of thing can be forced. No words can create it. After all, they are only expressions, the vehicles that contain the feelings that move us. It can only happen naturally as the expression of energy between two people, but when it does... wow. You probably know that feeling of incredible bonding, when all barriers melt and drop away, and two people come together, the mingling of energy building and increasing and intensifying, becoming an expression of aliveness that words can express but never capture fully. It has instead to be indulged inside your own imagination, deep inside you.

Writing to you, as a person who can experience that kind of connection, just how much can you look forward to enjoying that with someone who moves you in that way? As you remember what it would be like, and find those possibilities opening before you in such a way that anything else blurs into insignificance, how powerfully will you feel an urge to act on it? I feel that like in Blink, a strong intuitive feeling is all that is necessary to move us into action.