It has taken time. Our initial meeting may or may not have facilitated it. You may or may not have made it easy. I persisted. And now we have been through things together. It has been well worth the effort and energy.
You know me. This is easy, as I wear my heart on my sleeve–always have. It doesn’t take much to know me; but I don’t let just anybody in. I give the benefit of the doubt; I also trust my protective instincts.
Time. There is no substitute. And it’s not enough. Knowing requires engagement, intentional and volitional. Time helps, providing opportunity, enabling continuity.
With enough time and encounters, knowing emerges organically. Over years and decades it becomes intuitive, if we pay attention.
I see you. I think of you when I see things you like. I hear you–not just when you speak, but when you cross my mind. I anticipate your words and expressions in response to ideas and opinions. I know you.
Knowing and feeling known nourish us. No matter the context. We are wired to connect–to one another, our fellow humans. Meeting over and again, small and big moments alike, each building on the last. Memories accumulating, recollections shared.
Life unfolds. We are who we are at our core, and continue to be so. We also learn, grow, and evolve. Change and stay the same. Those who know us see no contradiction here. Rather, known in our wholeness over time, in continuity, we all make sense.
This season, may we reflect on and consider how we know and are known. May we find the courage and resolution to express and connect in depth and meaning. May we practice openness, curiosity, non-judgment, and acceptance more than other things. May our relationships strengthen and tighten in the best ways.
In this life, our relationships save us. Continuity of connection, if we have the fortune, is a priceless gift. Let us not take it for granted.
Husband says he sees November as stressful for me every year (for the tenth year in a row now), referring to the 30 days of daily blogging. I don’t want to admit it, but it’s at least partially true. It shows in my eating habits, I didn’t quite have my edge in the gym yesterday, and there are likely other consequences. I’m not losing sleep these last couple years, which is a drastic improvement from before. And I’m still cooking regularly now, which is also better! So it’s not bad news at all; this is good stress. It’s probably a 95% challenge, 5% threat sensation, and 10/10 meaning. It’s already two-thirds over, and I think these posts could be some of my best writing yet. Win-win-win!
One of the biggest challenges the last 20 days (starting 10/31) has been fully articulating an idea that may have only occurred to me within 12 hours of posting. I feel I have met that challenge well, and I’m proud of the output so far as it is honest and offered wholeheartedly.
My first solid idea for tonight’s post came to me while eating dinner and listening to What Is Health? by Peter Sterling. It was so exciting and also quite complex, so I procrastinated. It needs to marinate a bit more. Then the universe sent me the Instagram story in the photo above from my friend James. It reads:
Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object.” –Ram Daas
My immediate response to James: “OMG YAAAASS!!! What if we all tapped into this deep well of Agape just a little more every day!?!? [Home Alone face emoji, smiley surrounded by hearts emoji] James replied, “Yes, what if?? What’s stopping us?” We agreed that conversation is best saved for our next in person communion. I shared the story on my own account with a similar admonishing question, feeling a full body rush of joy, optimism, and possibility.
We tend to think of love as an emotion. We probably experience it as such at least some of the time–a limbic sensation that comes over us and then dissipates–a signal of something to pay attention to, something that matters to us. But I learned recently that love is more of a drive, like hunger or thirst; it manifests consistently, if in waves, impelling us to behave and relate in ways that advance our own survival. Romantic love drives us to partner and procreate. Pair bonding and parental love drives us to tend to our progeny so our genes may live on for another generation. So if we think of it this way and apply it to relationships in nested scale (family unit, village, state, nation, all of humanity), how does that alter our perspective?
To me, it all suddenly feels so simple. We are all here to love one another, to help us all survive and thrive. We are all someone’s child. Many of us are someone’s sibling, someone’s parent. I hope we are all someone’s good friend. We all share this planet, this lifetime. We are all here. Now. Living. Doing our Best. So when I’m tired, I can relax and rest in this one simple idea: Love.
What if we accept Ram Daas’s premise? What if unconditional love really is part of our deep inner being? And what if we fully accepted, acknowledged, and manifested this just a little more every day? How would that feel? What would we do as a result? How would we be? I feel at peace. I feel confident that we can figure it all out, whatever it is, ODOMOBaaT–one day, one moment, one breath at a time. I smile more. I approach people with ease and friendliness, as if any person I meet could be my next new good friend. I am my favorite self.
So I Hold Love for Us tonight, friends. It took 20 days for it to emerge this month. I wondered when and how it would come up; it was #6 on my pre-NaBlo prep list of 30 things to Hold. How does it feel when you Hold Love? Where and when is it easy and difficult? How and what do you do when it’s really hard?
Nope. Beastly Beauty by Jennifer Donnelly wins, and it’s all good. I can only engage with this story in this moment, and I know exactly why. My review from earlier this year:
Donnelly retells Beauty and the Beast with astute and imaginative gender role reversal. Such exquisitely clever writing, an intricate and stimulating story, and so many life lessons intertwined and artfully presented–HIGHLY RECOMMEND! Heroine is nerdy, kind, and complex, caught between her own strong, gifted nature and toxic, choking social norms. Hero steals a reader’s heart with his own one of gold, his fortitude and loyalty. Ancillary characters provide depth and elaboration to the twisty, always engaging story arc–11 hours of audio went by in a flash–I could hardly put it down. I have admired Steve West’s solo full cast performances in books like For Love of Magic and the Queen’s Thief series, but his talents shine forth on even brighter display in this piece more than any other: Men, women, children, and personalities that span all of humanity and our full sweep of emotions, quite literally. I have purchased the book in print now to annotate and consolidate lessons in self-awareness, self-regulation, effective communication, and emotional integration… All from a reinvented fairy tale. BRAVA!
Sometimes we can approach politics from a new and different angle. Tonight I approach by way of excellent fiction. Thank God for gifted writers like Donnelly, who show us our hearts, traumas, demons, and foibles with compassion, humor, and grace. Fiction’s paradox is that it provides escape and introspection all at once–freeing us from while also bringing us deeper into ourselves. Themes from Beastly Beauty that speak to me in this moment: -Rigid and destructive assumptions based on convention, expectation, and limited information -Despair and Hope -The healing forces of deep, abiding Love -Faith in self, others, and humanity in general -To be known in one’s wholeness -Invention and co-creation -Urgency for action lest the world as we know it ends -Collaborating with ‘the enemy’ -The slow turn of trust -We, together, are the answer
“…Self-awareness, self-regulation, effective communication, and emotional integration…” How many of us think we do these well, and ‘they’ do not? How many of us believe the ‘others’, about half of the voting population, are unworthy humans, willfully, destructively ignorant, and otherwise unfit to wield a vote? We are sure, just based on how they voted, right? Of course this is true, just look at the facts, we insist. We forget that our perceptions are already half formed in advance of information input, and shaped by more than just ‘facts.’
How do our self-delusions of superiority and attitudes of disdain keep us separated, miserable, and collectively utterly dysfunctional? I ask this of myself and us all, my friends, Red and Blue alike. We are all emotional beings with the capacity for reason. Our decisions are emotional at their core, filtered, mitigated, and moderated by rationality, unless and until we get hijacked. Our degrees of awareness and self-regulation are directly proportional to our degrees of intellectual humility, openness to perspectives other than our own and thus openness to change, and the psychological safety for vulnerability provided by those surrounding us. How well do we provide the latter for one another, even in our own tribes? Try expressing a dissenting view among friends one day and see.
I had meant to recommend this book to you all tonight, even including spoilers to make my case. Again, nope.
I Hold Stories of Humanity for Us all tonight; this one happens to speak deeply to me. I Hold Stories of Humanity for Us so we may all feel seen, heard, understood, accepted, and loved, no matter who we are, how we voted, or anything else about us. I Hold Stories of Humanity for Us because these are the stories that save us from and for one another. I hope you find stories that do this for you, too.
