"All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you."

—Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

These lines appear as a kind of scripture in Butler's novel—spare, almost liturgical, impossible to argue with. Everything we touch is altered by the contact. And we are altered by everything we touch. The self that believes it can move through life without being changed by it may be the most isolated self of all.

This may be an invitation to take ordinary contact more seriously. The conversation we half-showed up for. The person we moved past without quite seeing. The moment we touched something true and then retreated. Each of these is an exchange—something passes in both directions, whether we intend it or not. Paying attention to what we are actually touching, and allowing it to touch us, may be closer to what love looks like in practice than almost anything else.