On Carrying

There is a deep intimacy that comes with the act of carrying. This thought came to me as I staggered home from campus the other day, a bulging book bag dangling heavily from my shoulders.

There is no hiding in the act of carrying, no concealing the weight, heft and volume of the object(s) being carried; no faking the strength, will and capacity needed by the one doing the carrying. No amount of girdles, vertical stripes, or other visual deception can alter the knowledge revealed through carrying.

To lift, hold, balance, cradle, and move an object yields an immediate body-to-body experience that other ways of transporting just do not possess.

To carry is to know; it demands that we respond and bend our energies and attention to the needs of the other. It is relational, cooperative. Successful carrying calls upon the two partners - the carrier and the carried - to work to fit together, to accommodate each other, wrap around, blend and meld into each other. This is of mutual benefit for to aid the other is to aid ourselves.

Perhaps that is why the Torah tells us God carried us as we entered into the sacred covenant - so that we could know each other in the most intimate of ways, and support each other in ways that precluded hiding or dissembling.

And perhaps that is why marriage is called nissuin, from the root n.s.a., to lift and carry, for marriage requires mutual shifting, adjusting, melding, each continually responding to the other. Nissuin is plural, reciprocal, for in marriage, it is first the one then the other who at times carries and at times is carried.

(Perhaps that is one reason, too, why we indulge in the otherwise anachronistic tradition of groom's carrying brides over thresholds.)

So too, more prosaically but no less pointedly, when we carry around the stuff and substance of our daily lives, when our physical possessions lay deep within our arms, or are splayed across our backs, hang upon our shoulders, when we cannot put them down until we get to our destination, we gain a greater intimacy of the earth, what we have taken from it, what we have done to it, and how we rely upon it.

I imagine that if we had to carry everything we bought, every piece we possessed, everything we threw away, we would gain a deeper intimacy and appreciation of the world's stuff, humanity's ingenuity, and what it will take to successfully carry each other across the years yet to come.