The Difference Between Action and Contact

It is not unusual for some men to always be doing something. Those things can include work, messages, calls, solving problems, planning the next steps.

It often looks like competence. A busy man living his life. However, at a point, action turns into something else. Often is something else.

For instance, a substitute for contact. Contact with self, contact with others, contact with what is actually happening in the body, in the moment, in life.

I have been noticing this for a long time. It is present in many men I know.

Some conversations with a friend of mine are a good example. He is constantly in motion.

Not just physically, necessarily. Mentally and socially. Always responding. Always engaging.

Always moving something forward. If there is nothing to do, he finds something. It is not unusual for him to be on two or three different calls. Do you know those Wall Street films? Or TV shows like Billions or Succession? Not that my friend is a billionaire or a stockbroker, but you get the idea.

It is also not unusual for his communication to become all mixed up. Contact requires you to be where you are, not where the next action is pulling you. To be on one call. Not three, while, at the same time, speaking to the service station attendant.

Action, lots of talk, can feel like connection. Replying to messages can feel like relating. Solving problems can feel like caring — it is, but not if it is an escape. Organising something can feel like being engaged with life.

Often, those things do not guarantee contact. Sometimes they replace it.

In The Listening Room HQ work, this shows up in subtle ways, and is one of the themes addressed at the sessions.

Time and time again, there is a man who cannot sit in silence without reaching for something to do. A man who fills every gap. A man who cannot feel the space between one action and the next.

He has become unfamiliar with stillness, leading to action as an attempt at regulation.

When a man loses contact with himself, he often also loses contact with others, because the interaction becomes routed through function:

What needs to be done. What needs to be solved. What needs to be said next.

Instead of what is actually here between us right now.

This is where relationships start to thin out, even while communication increases. More messages. More coordination. More activity.

Less being fully present. Less real exchange. The paradox is that, as a general rule, the more action increases, the more contact can quietly decrease.

I am not arguing against action.
Action is necessary. It is part of life.
Without contact it eventually becomes mechanical.

People can feel that, even if they do not know what is happening.

The relational quality differs when contact is present. Time slows slightly. Attention gathers. Silence has use.

The next response is not already sitting in the future. You are in it.

This is a part that interests me in my work on The Listening Room HQ.

Restoring the ability to stay in contact while things are being done.

How to remain internally present while externally active. How, if action is required, to have more contact, meaningful contact, inside it.

Without that, even a full life starts to feel distant, slipping between our fingers.

[painting: Wassily Kandinsky - Contact, 1924] ]

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