There are lots of things I should have done yesterday, and the day before. Probably the day before that too, but sometimes days melt together like endless lucid dreams and I can’t decipher what day is what. Those are the bad days. On bad days, I sit outside myself and judge everything I am. I sit crosslegged with narrowed piercing eyes staring at the version of myself that I deem weak and wanton. The shame and disgust at my lack of ability to function as I am told I should, can be brutal. All the perceived shoulds of the world come at me like a nuclear attack sending me deeper into despair. Scrambling to find something to hold onto, I realize that I am the attacker. Behind every should are deep lessons to learn. So deep are these lessons, that if we miss them, we will never know what being human is truly about. Behind every should is the truth and that truth is love.
I am human after all
I wonder sometimes, what the world would look like if we were not ashamed of our own hearts. Perhaps we would understand love better. Love that makes life worth living is eternal and endlessly bountiful, endlessly beautiful. It doesn’t start and end because we say so. Love is the goal in all that we do no matter what. Affording ourselves love is the most difficult of all things. I don’t even fully understand what it is to love myself but on the better days, I gain some insight. Today is a better day and I understand somewhat that my endless ability to love others needs to also include myself. I am in a period of recovery and growth – again! Story of my life really but I’m not going into all that now. I could apply a should here and say I should be recovered a long time ago. But it’s in recovery that we learn and come out the other side knowledgeable and more human than before. Perhaps even closer to Spirit than we once were. Pain brings us to peace eventually. The healing comes as quickly or as slowly as our willingness to accept. We eventually arrive home to ourselves again, but with more love and compassion for our humanness and a deeper understanding that to judge our hearts goes against the very reason we are on this planet.
Doing the right thing
A period of pain, recovery and growth also brings with it responsibility. We cannot unknow what we have just learned. We can definitely ignore it and carry on as before with destructive patterns and needing to own everything and everyone we love. What we feel then becomes the very opposite of love. Making use of your recovery and growth means doing the right thing and understanding love in the right context. I am not Christian or conventionally religious but I heard this spoken from an alter many years ago, and it stayed with me. 1 Corinthians 13:4-5: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Pain brings love, but love is not pain. Our perception of what love should look like, or the idea that we have lost love is painful. Love shared is eternal regardless of the current situation. Attraction is fleeting, but to love the soul of another is to see the purity of that being, despite the outward actions. That purity of love inevitably includes ourselves. Our behaviors stem from our own understanding of our past and present situations. Seeing beyond that to our own and others’ hearts and souls brings us new understanding and therefore compassion.
Behind every should is the truth, and that truth is love.
