Learning by doing

Insights come in little drips. Repeatedly.

My beloved and I have a ritual in the evenings that helps us structure our conversation about my submission and her work with me on finding a place from which she can celebrate who I am.

She has been generous the past week or so with little commands - I suspect we'll want to come up with a cute name for them. But they're huge for me. I was at a concert and she was away when she texted me to "put one foot in front of the other for two minutes." I did, and marveled at how it made me feel: connected to her, content, in short, "loved." Why?

I'm currently going on the theory that people hear different things in different ways. I am perfectly able to hear "I love you" from my beloved, and internalize it in an intellectual way. But there are aspects of my life where I learn much more kinesthetically, and I'm wondering if emotional learning is one of those aspects. If my beloved tells me to do something, then the muscle memory, and attention, the time, the feeling of doing it penetrates my emotions much more deeply. In short, doing the arbitrary, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes inconvenient things she sets for me, allows me to emotionally hear "I love you" in a way that I can't otherwise.