Relationships and the closing of circles

Relationships truly are the sum of our lives.  We create circles of friends, neighbors, family, strangers, pets, nature, ideas, and ultimately ourselves.  With all the practice that we have in relationships throughout our lives, you would think that we would be experts at having them and doing them well, handling issues and avoiding problems.  Yet, we have all experienced some people and situations in our lives that we can find difficult.  This is not to say we ourselves are never difficult.  I have had many opportunities to muddle through turmoil.  I have experienced and created as much as the next person.  So along the way I have learned that relationships, as in life, don’t always turn out just the way I want.

I had a painful experience in 2013, it was a situation in which I wasn’t able to navigate a friendly way through a disagreement, even though that was what I wanted more than anything… at the time.  I see myself as someone willing to work things out, look for the win win, find compromises, etc.  I am also blessed to have people willing to be honest with me.  I know that I have my, one-sided, perspective and I don’t always see myself fully.  So, while my trusted people are happy to point out my flaws, they also tell me that they see me as someone who sincerely tries to find the middle ground in relationship disagreements.

Which brings me to the situation.  There are people in the world who will only feel good about you, as long as you bend to their perspective.  They are not interested in seeing how they contributed to an issue or disagreement.  They really want you to know that they are mad at you, and it’s your fault, and unless you admit to this fully, and ‘show’ them that you understand their ‘rightness,’ the situation won’t ever get to a place where it feels comfortable.  And, even if you do take 100% responsibility for their feelings, it still might not be enough.

I work hard to hold myself accountable and I willingly acknowledge my own part in situations.  I apologize when my intentions were quite different from my impact.

Unintentional impact can still hurt another person.

I am truly sorry when I hurt someones feelings, even though that generally is never my intention.  Still, in some situations you cannot own your own issues or your part in the disagreement enough for the other person, they want more, they want it to be one-sided, all your fault. They point to things that were said, using contexts that weren’t intended, often rigid, black and white ideas of right and wrong.  They have listened for ammo, and they willingly use that ammo against you.  And, no matter how much you try to hear them and work to show you are listening, when you try to share your perspective, they are not interested in hearing you.  They are really just interested in being heard. Trying to work through a disagreement under these terms is hard work, it’s emotionally exhausting.

For most of us, this is a ‘crazy maker.’

If we care, even a little, about the relationship, we want to find the middle ground. We want to hear and be heard.  We want some sort of closure that feels like we can walk away with respect or kindness, agree to disagree and still have a level of respect.  Yet, this is not always possible.  When we find ourselves in one of these endings, we often struggle with self doubt, and wishfulness that we are going to find a path to resolve the situation.  Sometimes, instead, we have to learn to ‘let go.’  In some belief systems they say, “Let Go and Let God.”  I love Frank Herbert’s quote, “There are no endings, just places where you stop the story,” and one of my favorites, “It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past, those moments in life that are over.” by Paulo Coelho.

Even if it doesn’t feel finished, we may have to let go and close the circle.

Allowing someone to see you in the worst light, and still let go with love, let go with forgiveness for our part, let go with forgiveness for the other parties part.  I believe that the process of letting go is a powerful way through the sad feelings or angry ones.  Letting go of the attachment about how people see us.  Letting go of what they say about us.  Letting go of the ‘crazy maker’ so that we can continue with our own story.  For me the big take away from 2013, and I have learned this lesson a few times in my life so it feels easier this time, is that there are places when my sense of self is so different from someone else’s sense of me that the two ideas of me are too incompatible to continue in any sort of close proximity.  If I’ve been honest with myself, gotten feedback from those I trust, looked at my part of the situation, attempted to repair the hurts, but still been met with rigid, angry judgement, then I have to let go for my own sanity.  Grieve the loss, but let go of the idea that I can influence a more realistic idea of me, one that is a little closer to my own.  And, really, what is lost when people don’t want the same thing?  The only loss is an idea of the relationship, an idea that might have existed once, but needs to be released, because it’s now an old idea of a relationship that’s changed.

Your opinion of me, is none of my business.

For my part, if I can do this, then I let go of the spinning of my mind.  The wrangling to make reasonable, or rationalize, or over process my thoughts and feelings.  I learn to just ‘be’ in this moment, uncomfortable though it is, until the next moment shows up.  I do this over and over, through this moment and the next and the next.  Until the moment that I am in, absorbs me fully, and my life circles on.

Messy Love

“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.”
Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I am not sure exactly why this quote has so captured me.  Especially in the hindsight that Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s husband, Charles Lindbergh, had three other families (wives and kids) in Europe. It’s unclear if she knew this or not. I would find it a little hard to imagine such a smart woman being completely ignorant of who her husband was, and what he was capable of, even if she didn’t know the specifics. So, maybe she did know that he had affairs, and maybe she understood that love is complicated and messy. That often we are hurt, not by another’s actions, but rather by the idea that we have of who they are and how they should act, instead of loving them in spite of the fact that we feel failed by them, for not being what we want them to be.

There are boundaries that may be healthy for us, for me affairs cross a boundary in a marriage. Would I love my husband less if he had an affair? No, don’t think so, the love would remain. I’m not sure if I would stay in the relationship, certainly if I stayed it wouldn’t be in the same relationship that we had. I don’t know what the relationship would look like, but it would change as I changed my thoughts about myself, my husband and the new “now” of our marriage. Love can bind us to people and places, it can give us purpose to learn and to move through the fear of vulnerability, and if we let it, it teaches us to stay true to love that is just for love.

Change through time is true in all relationships, family, friends, and lovers, even without traumas and dramas. We are constantly shifting how we feel about other people.  How we think about ourselves and how we think about them, changes how we feel about them.  We do this all the time.  Think about the myriad of ways that we get angry or annoyed with people, even people we love, for much less concerning issues; the kids leave lights on everywhere they go, you ask nicely, you ask sharply, you ask and ask and ask, and still, no matter where in the house you walk, the lights are on. You scream, you rant, you threaten, and in these moments you don’t love in a loving way. Because your love has stories and expectations woven into the core of it. If you loved me, you would turn off the lights because you know and care what that means to me… Or, you would turn off the lights because it’s the responsible thing to do, or it saves money, whatever. Unspoken stories, I love you when you… do what I want?  The weft and weave as I sit in my justified nagging and yelling place, not showing love, because you didn’t meet my expectations. Is this conceivably true? Can I possibly be so self centered and demanding? Having unrealistic expectations of others and then wondering why the relationship feels distant or hurtful. This is the way of severing and ending relationships, this is not loving.

Just where is my responsibility for my needs, my feelings, and my expectations? Why don’t I turn off lights as I come to them instead of being unloving? Tell myself new stories that don’t connect my love for you, or your love for me, to my expectations? This simple shift is probably the hardest thing to do. The fine line between a healthy boundary and an unrealistic expectation. This shift takes courage, because like life, it’s fragile and filled with the longing of wanting to be loved in return, and we cannot control that. It takes the strength and flexibility of a dancer walking on a tightrope with no safety net and also dancing with a partner navigating the same dangerous ground.

Not many of us do this balance well. We may have areas where we sit in Buddha like calm over a topic while the world around us loses it’s collective mind. Yet, there are always chinks in our perceptions, places where we lose our own minds, often to issues or ideas that someone else has no problem with. It keeps us humble, we aren’t so perfect ourselves.  We are all creatures of light, but also of shadow. When we recognize our imperfection, do we then withhold love from ourselves?  Often the answer is “yes.” If this is true, how can you truly love another, with all their messy imperfections, if we can’t love our own self, with all of our messy imperfections? We hide and hate our shortcomings, we drown them and pretend they don’t exist, instead focusing on the shortcomings of others.  Isn’t the idea “to love others as we love ourself” at the core of all world religions? I think “yes.” My very purpose in this life is to recognize the places in myself that need to be challenged, tweaked and tuned, to learn to love myself through the process, and learn to love others in spite of my (mis)perceptions and (mis)expectations of them. Allowing for the ebb and flow, the here and now. Being present to the tide as it dances by my shore.

This is a repost from my other blog, which I closed down.