Sunday | May 18, 2008
Fate has led you through it, you do what you have to do.
"Life is messy, sweetie."
That's what my mom said to me yesterday. "It's messy and for the most part, you don't get to choose what happens. Things usually won't go as you plan them. Your life will be full of things you don't expect... some of them really hard. But if you surrender and follow the threads where they take you, you might find that it'll be full of things more wonderful than you could ever possibly have imagined."
My mom, she's a wise one. She says this from personal experience. She's a psychotherapist who's fittingly usually stays away from giving me advice, but this weekend, for some reason, while talking with me about what has been on my mind and in my life, she let this and much more rip. And I'm so thankful for it... for her. While I'm pretty sure this advice would fit in well anywhere, it's perfectly appropriate for me right now.
She knows that.
It has been said that our experiences, particularly with other people, are there to teach us things about ourselves. Ultimately, they might even hold the eventual key to personal utopia... to the remarkable place inside where everything is perfectly okay exactly as it is. I believe that this is true. This last year has been a whirlwind of incredible learning for me, on the heels of many, many years of self exploration. I might even call it epiphany. I might even call it the thing I've been looking for all these years. And while I don't pretend to be within my personal utopia, I think I'm closer than I've ever been before.
The next time I have the incredible honor and privilege of genuinely and unconditionally loving another person, I'm going to take really good care of it. Whatever it takes, I'll do everything I can to be in the present moment with that other person. I'll release any and all agenda. I'll abandon my expectations. I'll take responsibility for my own fears, my own hesitations, and my own shortcomings. I'll work through my own issues, without laying them onto the person I love. My first and foremost priority will be simply loving that other person. I'll love him exactly as he is, without wanting change, without rushing anything at all. I'll focus on giving rather than receiving, in complete reverence for the moment in time, however brief, in which I had the tremendously rare experience of genuinely loving another person.
Whenever the time might come, I think I'm finally ready to do this. It took not doing it to realize I was missing the point all along. And I say "finally" because I feel like it has taken me so long to get to this place. In reality, I know that most people never get here... to the realization that no matter what happens, it's enough to simply have loved another person in this way. The future does not matter. What I do or do not do in the future does not matter. My future achievements, my future life roles... all things I previously held onto with determined fervor... they don't matter.
Nothing else matters.
And I feel really, really free.
In the interest of giving appropriate credit, I titled this post after lyrics from the song in the video below, mostly because I seem to find some thread of personal connection to almost every song Sarah McLachlan has ever written:
Filed Under: Counting My Blessings , Dating & Relationships , Video
Comments
Comments are closed for this entry.
Category Archives
This website is powered by Movable Type and hosted by LivingDot.
© 2004-2008 thejulietfiles.com
