On Sailing through Tides, Ebb as well as Flow
in the midst of trying to find my way in these man/woman relationship issues, the below seems to address a few snags obstructing my truthful path. It sounds so obvious, I've been reading and underwriting such a vision of relationship for years - in theory.
In practice, I stumble.
By putting it here, and reading and re-reading, I hope to stumble less and stand stronger.
The Flow of intimacy i something i continously seek
Why do i need its nourishment so?
Why, when it temporarily ebbs away,
do i lack faith and allow doubt to reign?
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1906 - 2001
1 comment:
successful relationships, i am told, are in part about knowing when to fight for something, and knowing when to let go. i think this can be equally applied to many things in life, including areas where doubts seem to loom like an incessant fog. usually, where there is turmoil, some force in the cosmos is trying to tell us something. either about ourselves, or something in our lives. the wisdom for how to walk through life, and the kind of person you want to be, lies within you. try not to be so hard on yourself, because you will begin to trust yourself less. instead, trust yourself more, and see which feelings are reinforced.
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