A Love That Never Dies

“You taught me how to love; you taught me how to live; you taught me how to laugh; you taught me how to cry, but when you left, you forgot to teach me how to forget you.” ~ Hendie

Not too long ago, my mother was telling me about a friend of hers, Anita, who recently lost her husband after a long battle with cancer. She and her husband had been married for almost fifty years, and were only a few weeks shy of celebrating their anniversary. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship - their roles were defined and perfectly aligned, and worked together with the precision of a Swiss clock.

When her husband passed away, Anita was lost. Not only did she have to rely on her sons to take care of mundane matters - she told my mother - but also had to forgive herself for still being alive.

When someone we love suddenly leaves our lives, letting go of them feels like a betrayal. We hang on to pain as an invisible rope that keeps us connected to their essence, and feel that if we let go of the pain we will lose them completely. If we move on, and begin to live again, we feel guilty of leaving them behind, or, if they have chosen to leave willingly, we feel that by forgetting the pain we are condoning their acts.

Truth be said, what connects us to loved ones who are no longer with us is not pain, but the memories we have created over time. As long as we hold our loved ones in our hearts and minds, they will never be gone.

Regardless of how we have lost that person – through physical death or choice of a different path – we need to allow ourselves time to heal. In some Native American traditions, when someone leaves, a specific ritual is performed to “cut the ties that bind”. We establish energetic ties with all who cross our path and become important to us; when something happens to upset the connection the ties become a stranglehold, and stop both from moving forward. Cutting the emotional ties does in no way separate us from the beautiful moments that connected us to them, but only severs the need to hold on to pain.

Those of us who have any kind of spiritual affiliation know that all things happen for a reason. Maybe we had a soul agreement with that person to be in our lives only for a short while and teach us something about ourselves, or we may have something more we need to accomplish before we go while the other person had already fulfilled their life contract. We could drive ourselves mad searching for reasons that may not be for us to know. What counts is that the person we loved came into our lives and left something with us before they departed. Their gift to us may be one we might not readily see or understand, but it undoubtedly touched our lives and changed us in some way.

There is a season to seed and one to blossom; there is a season to ripen and one to harvest. There is a time to hope, to laugh and cry, but most of all, there is a time to be grateful for every chance we have to experience love.

Floating vs. Drowning

“Fear is faith that it won’t work out.” ~ Author unknown


While watching a comedy sitcom in which a kid was trying to learn how to swim, I saw my daughter become pensive for a moment. Then, with a puzzled look spreading across her little face, she said: “If I can swim, why is he having such a hard time with it? He can just float.”

I tried to remind her of when she didn’t know how to swim either, and how apprehensive she was when the swimming instructor first asked her to ‘let go’, but since that moment in her life was long past, she simply shrugged her shoulders and remarked that all the kid has to do is to let himself float.

Since there was no point in arguing her down - and also because she had a point somehow – I only told her that fear is what stops people from swimming, and adds pounds to their bodies making them a dead weight; since she is no longer scared, she can abandon herself to the water and float easily. That explanation didn’t really satisfy her never-ending curiosity, but her five-year-old attention span saved the day; she had enough of my “weird” explanations and happily trotted off the next room to play. On the contrary, my daughter’s simple question left me with a couple of points to ponder.

We readily assume that our reality is largely affected by facts that can be proven through physics or other scientific disciplines, but if one analyzes the water Morgan swims into, and the water the kid in the show fought with, there is really no chemical difference between the two. Just as well, the second kid’s struggle cannot be attributed to him being heavier than my daughter, as there are many people larger than him swimming like fish. In fact, body weight has little to do with staying afloat, since heavier people can at times float better because they displace more water. So what can possibly stop one kid from floating which doesn’t affect other people who know how to swim? The answer is a simple one…the kid who can’t float is just allowing is fear of drowning to overwhelm his natural ability to float on water because the focus of his faith is not in succeeding but in failing.

Swimming isn’t the only skill we forfeit because of fear, and every day we lose wonderful opportunities to grow and evolve because we are scared of the unknown facing us. We have faith that we can stand up and thrive on solid ground, and we have no trouble doing so, but we question our faith when it comes to dive into unfamiliar waters; similarly, we have faith that our lives will run smooth if we follow old, proven channels, but we have faith we will lose our stability if we think outside the box and take a risk.

To elaborate using a very recent example, I will share something else. My husband occasionally buys lottery tickets, and yesterday morning he asked me to check the numbers of his ticket online while one of our sons was in the kitchen eating breakfast; when he heard what his father asked, Michael mindlessly asked if we are ever going to win the lottery; without thinking twice, my husband replied no. I almost asked him why he bothered to even buy tickets if he already assumed that he is never going to win, but quickly dismissed the question and moved on with my day; I can assure you however, that until he can change the focus of his faith, you will never read on the paper that the Carrington-Smiths in Raleigh NC have won the Power Ball! Since he expects to not win, Universe has no choice but to indulge him.

Faith and confidence can carry a person on powerful ethereal wings, as long as one doesn’t decide to look down and mentally calculate the depth of the fall. So, in so many ways my daughter is completely right – if she can swim, so should everybody. As long as they can believe they can.

One Block at a Time

“The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” ~Chinese Proverb

While playing Lego blocks with my daughter, yesterday afternoon, my attention was piqued by a home she had built for one of her little miniature dolls. She had erected the walls around the figurine, and in the excitement of the moment, she had forgotten to include a door.

Here was the poor little doll, sitting in a cluster of colored plastic bricks tightly intertwined together as fingers in prayer; her painted eyes were fixed against the wall in front of her, and her hands rested hopelessly at her sides – a prisoner of her own play-world.

When I mentioned to my daughter about the missing door, she raised an eyebrow and studied the situation for a moment, then began to remove blocks – one at a time – from one of the walls. In no time, sunlight streamed through the opening and kissed the blonde hair of the doll with a sparkle of gold. My daughter smiled, and said: “See mom? All you have to do is remove some of the bricks”.

Her words opened another door - one of awareness, this time. How often do we build walls around ourselves, and do so gradually and slowly enough that we forget they are even there? Since childhood we are handed out blocks by people and events, and we quietly stack them one above the other as a reflex. We are given blocks of rules, religious convictions, societal manners, external judgment, and we arrange them around ourselves as we try to determine who we are. Once adults, we continue to build with extra blocks that we accept and make our own as we shape the course of our lives.

Once the walls are built, they appear impenetrable, and we learn how to live within their confines if we fail to see a way out. Yet, it is always possible to get out. Regardless of the situation we may be closed into, we are never fully trapped until we believe we are.

Walls are made of individual bricks, and those bricks can be removed, one by one, in the reverse order they were stacked up. Knocking down a whole wall at one time would require too much energy, and, frankly, adjusting to such a radical change would be more traumatizing than remaining within the protective walls we have built overtime.

Removing one block at a time allows us the opportunity to grow stronger with each phase of the removal, and gives us time to integrate the new awareness within the folds of what we deem comfortable and acceptable. As a prisoner who’s been locked up in the darkness of a cell for years, we need time to adjust to the brightness of sunshine.

Once we finished our Lego house, my daughter looked at it with pride, and no better words could have been spoken that when she said: “Look, Mom, Kelly is happy now – she has a beautiful house and she is free to go out to play.”