The Electricity Between

At first encounter with meaning-centred existential psychology, people often ask where meaning is actually found. Viktor Frankl described three broad sources of meaning. There is the meaning we create through our work, our creativity, and the ways we contribute to the world. There is the meaning we receive through encounter—with another person, with nature, with art, with beauty, with experiences that exceed our capacity for planning or control. And finally, there is the meaning we discover in the attitude we choose towards unavoidable suffering. Each deserves an essay of its own. Today, though, I’d like to dwell on the second: the meanings that arrive not through striving, but through receptivity; not through achievement, but through encounter. They are gifts we cannot manufacture, only receive, and they are often the ones that reach us most deeply.

The most profound encounter of this kind in my own life has been my relationship with my wife.

Love is one of those words that is easily flattened—reduced to emotion, compatibility, or the intoxicating chemistry of early attraction. Viktor Frankl was careful to distinguish these things. He described three levels of human connection: physical attraction, psychological affinity, and spiritual union. The first two are genuine and important, but neither alone has the depth to sustain a relationship through time, suffering, and change. Only the third—the I-Thou encounter of two people meeting one another at the level of their essential being—carries that kind of permanence.

What my wife and I share feels close to what Frankl meant by spiritual union. I say this neither lightly nor romantically. Our life together has known difficulty, challenge, and periods of genuine pain. Yet beneath everything that has changed, something has remained remarkably constant: a strong current of fidelity that seems strangely independent of circumstance. Not because circumstances cease to matter, but because they never quite touch its deepest foundation.

I have come to think that this is what love truly is. Not simply a feeling, but a ground of shared being upon which everything else unfolds.

And yet I cannot fully explain it, nor take much credit for it. The flame that continues to burn through hardship and time feels less like an achievement than a gift. Effort matters. Communication matters. Commitment matters. But none of them can produce this mysterious and evolving blaze. No technique guarantees its sustenance.

Martin Buber once wrote that when two people relate to one another authentically, God is the electricity that surges between them. I remember encountering that image and immediately feeling recognised by it.

Whatever language we choose—grace, mystery, the sacred—it gestures towards something real that neither person creates alone, and neither fully possesses. It exists only in the relation itself. It can be welcomed, honoured, tended, and received with gratitude.

The other great source of encountered meaning in my life is nature.

There is a German word I have always loved: Waldeinsamkeit. It describes the feeling of being alone in a forest while experiencing a profound sense of peace—a solitude that feels less like isolation than belonging. It is one of my favourite experiences, and one I seek whenever I can. Something settles there.

The noise of ordinary life—the obligations, uncertainties, and ceaseless mental weather of existence—gradually falls away. What remains is something paradoxically old and fresh: the feeling of belonging to a reality immeasurably larger than oneself, without needing to define what that reality is. It does not arrive dramatically. It asks for nothing. It is simply there. And somehow, it is enough.

I have often noticed that this experience is among the most reliable antidotes I know to existential anxiety. Not because it answers life’s difficult questions, but because, for a while, the questions themselves lose their urgency. The forest has no need for certainty. It simply continues—meeting our inner turmoil with patience, beauty, and equanimity. There is something deeply reassuring about that.

Love and nature, intimate though one is and vast though the other may seem, share a common quality. Neither yields its deepest meaning to effort alone. Both require receptivity: the willingness to be affected, to be moved, to let something outside oneself matter completely.

Perhaps art belongs to this same family.

There are moments before a painting, a piece of music, or a poem when thought itself seems to fall silent. James Joyce referred to it as aesthetic arrest: that sudden suspension in which fear and desire momentarily disappear, and one simply beholds. Great works of art have this effect. They interrupt the ordinary movement of the mind and leave us, however briefly, in a state of pure presence.

The experience has always felt strangely familiar to me. It is not merely admiration for technical mastery or appreciation of beauty. It is the recognition of something that is at once deeply mysterious and somehow already known. The encounter seems to happen neither inside the artwork nor inside the observer, but in the living space between them. Something dormant awakens. A current finds its conductor.

I remember standing before paintings with tears streaming down my face, utterly unable to explain what was happening. There was no story, no interpretation, no obvious reason. Only an overwhelming sense of participation in something both profoundly intimate and infinitely larger than myself—something that seemed simultaneously within me and beyond me, immanent and transcendent at once.

This is perhaps one way of understanding experiential values. Meaning is not only something we produce or receive. Every genuine encounter is an exchange, a reciprocity. We are changed by the world, while perhaps the world, too, finds one more way of experiencing itself through us—through one small, finite perspective. The energy between a fleeting standpoint and the whole.

In a culture that prizes productivity, mastery, and self-sufficiency, this receptive mode of being is easily overlooked. Yet it is anything but passive. It asks for a different kind of courage: the courage to remain fully present without reducing mystery to explanation, beauty to analysis, or love to psychology. Some realities seem to deepen precisely because they resist our attempts to know or possess them.