As this year draws to a close and the season of giving is upon us, many will wonder what they truly want. This happens to me every year, because people ask me what I’d like to receive and I haven’t a clue. This really frustrates the person asking, but it really is true. I really don’t know.
Well, I do know what I want – it just isn’t anything that can be bought. I want to be together with loved ones, sharing the joy of the season. I want peace, as many us do, especially in the wake of the recent tragic shootings.
And, wanting peace can be a satisfying answer for a while, at least for me.
But, if I ask myself, long enough, what is it I really want, I can come up with 4 answers: I want deep, meaningful, long-lasting friendships; I want health for myself and those I love; I want money – at least enough to pay the bills, but I really want enough to do something meaningful with; and I want time enough to do what needs to be done, but moreso time enough to spend quality time with friends.
Some with wisdom, tell us that if we want these things in our lives, we have to be friends with them. For instance, most people will not have money in their lives if they are not friends with money. That may be true, but it’s not a very satisfying answer when you’re broke and needing money. But I thought I’d try being friends with these 4 things. Then, maybe my life would be perfect.
That didn’t work. It took a while, but I found that my relationship problems weren’t with money, time, health, or relationships. The person I wasn’t a friend with was myself. Now, it’s not that I hated myself. But there were certain aspects of my life I wasn’t fond of. First, of all, there were these dag-nab emotions. Slowly, very slowly, I became friends with my emotions. I started with the simple ones – like joy. And, eventually, even offered friendship to emotions like loneliness. After 50 years of living in the dull-drums, most of which were lived as a Vulcan without emotion, the Happy Baby I was born as, took control once more; though not without a fight.
But, even though Happy Baby was in control, life wasn’t perfect.
I learned how to drop deeper and deeper into my heart – out of my brain loops. The first place I found was very pleasant. But as I dropped deeper, I found all my worries and tried to fix all of them. Some of that was helpful, but there were just too many, so I dropped deeper into my heart. I got to a place where everything seemed possible. That was great, but only for a while. I needed to go deeper. Going deeper took me to a place where I faced my worst nightmare, the one I denied existed, the one I hadn’t faced my entire life. And there was only one choice – to acknowledge that pain and drop even deeper. At that deepest point was a place of connection, I just had to brush all the little baked on specs off the rim of the jar that is me, so that it can be sealed with a lid. Painful, excruciatingly painful to brush of those specs, but short-lived. Then I felt connected as I never had before – to life, the universe, to everything – and I could relax.
Being connected is NICE! And once I took that route, I could return often to being connected, usually much faster than the first time.
But it didn’t give me those things I wanted – deep friendships, health for my family, money, and time. At least it didn’t give me enough of them to satisfy me. So, I started again to wonder if I really wanted those things.
It’s not that I didn’t want those things, I wanted something more. I noticed that although, some parts of my fractured self were becoming less fractured as I became friends with those parts; there were others that were still fractured. For instance, I spent my life in one of three places – my physical sphere, my emotional sphere, or my spiritual sphere. But I rarely spent time in two of those spheres at the same time, and never in all three. Wanting the pain of that fracture to end, I allowed those spheres to come together and overlap.
And, as my fractured self became less fractured, I realized that what I really wanted was Wholeness, which I suppose is the same thing as Peace. And, with that realization, I resist it less and less. I keep moving towards Wholeness, even if sometimes it seems I’m moving in the wrong direction. I keep moving towards the type of Wholeness where I keep falling madly in love with my life over and over again!
We’re all on the road to wholeness. Some of us are more aware of it than others. We’re all taking different paths to get there, but many will encounter these things on their journey – Living from the heart, rather than the brain; Deep Connections; Loving yourself and your life to pieces; Happiness; Relationship becomes everything; and days when you realize you’re living in Paradise.
Dale Stubbart
Yellow Bear Journeys
A Friend on your Journey