Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play. I am not touched by an other when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only as I respond from my own centre – that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own centre, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response. The opposite of touching is moving. You move me by pressing me from without toward a place you have already foreseen and perhaps prepared. It is a staged action that succeeds only if in moving me you remain unmoved yourself … This means that we can be moved only by persons who are not what they are; we can be moved only when we are not who we are, but are what we cannot be.*
James Carse

Please excuse today’s long quote, but
I have long been fascinated by this passage, and
have found myself pondering what I think James Carse is describing.

I find myself imagining the U of Theory U,
At the bottom of which is found the rarely discovered world of
generative dialogue,
Where the true self of one person meets the
true self of the other –
The alternative being ego meeting self, or
ego meeting ego;
Only when self meets self can we be surprised by
the new.

Otherwise, when there is no surprise,
No new,
We are acting from our scripts,
Not our deeper creativity;
And though, sometimes it does not matter too much
that we are acting out of our role or job description
rather than our genius,
We may find ourselves with solutions that
have to be revisited again and again, whilst
the longer road of true self meeting true self –
Giving birth to surprise and a new possibility –
We identify not only a way forward, but also
experience transcendence and transformation.

*James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.