Happy Hump Day

Join me inside for a years worth of nude movement and art - see you there!

The Best Is Still There to Discover

It is one thing to see a person naked. It is another thing entirely to get to know someone and slowly see them naked in mind, body and soul.

We feed so much of our world with what we can immediately see. A face, a body, a home, a photograph, something new we have bought. We get excited by what is revealed to us, but perhaps we don’t realise that much of the beauty actually lives in everything we haven’t seen yet. The parts still waiting to be discovered.

Think about the beginning of a relationship. Seeing someone naked for the first time can be exciting because you haven’t seen them like that before. But so can watching them eat breakfast, discovering the strange way they sleep, hearing a story from their childhood or noticing some tiny little quirk you had no idea existed. There is this whole person in front of you that you haven’t explored yet.

Then months or years pass and something can change. We begin believing we know them.

We’ve seen their body. We’ve heard their stories. We know what they order, what annoys them, how they react and what they’ll probably say next. Curiosity quietly gets replaced by familiarity, and sometimes we mistake that familiarity for there being nothing new left to discover.

But how could that possibly be true?

We don’t even completely know ourselves. We change through what happens to us, what we learn, what frightens us, what excites us, what we lose and what we begin wanting that we never wanted before. The person beside us is changing too.

Maybe intimacy isn’t created because somebody once let us see them naked. Maybe intimacy is created because we keep wanting to see them.

Their body, yes, but also their thoughts. Their changing desires. Their fears. The things they’re only beginning to understand about themselves. The version of them that didn’t exist five years ago and the version that might appear five years from now.

Even something as ordinary as buying a new iPhone makes me think about this. At first we explore everything. We try the camera, discover features, change settings and marvel at what it can do. Eventually it becomes the thing we barely look at while holding it in our hand. Yet its value didn’t disappear because the novelty did. We simply stopped looking at it with curiosity.

People deserve far more curiosity than our phones.

Perhaps the magic of something new isn’t really that it is new. It is the feeling that there is more here than I have discovered yet.

What if we carried a little of that feeling forward? What if instead of thinking I know you, we kept asking what don’t I know about you yet? What if seeing someone naked wasn’t the end of the unveiling, but only one tiny part of it?

Maybe keeping intimacy alive isn’t always about finding something new.

Sometimes it is about finding a new perspective on something and someone we thought we already knew.