This morning I'm feeling my fingers, and brain, need to warm up before digging into the book, so I decided a blog was in order. Oftentimes I wake up with words that come flowing out of me, but as I have been traveling, several times I have felt a nudge to take a particular photo or even pull over and write something that sometimes delays my trip by an hour or two. I do it even though I don't always understand at the time what it will lead to. I've come to realize that the still, small voice inside my soul is so much wiser than my brain and I'm glad I've learned to trust and listen.
Some things in life go quickly and others slowly. I have a theory that when a person is generally happy, life flies by...but when one is sad, it moves at a snail's pace with one day feeling like a week, a week a month, and so on. It seems like it should be in reverse, but life isn't fair...and as I wrote that just now, it came to me that maybe it's that way on purpose. Maybe those of us who go through life feeling like it is going painfully slow are being given extra time to figure out how to actually live so when we do, it doesn't feel like life has flown by and now there's no time left to enjoy it. Sure, we all age at the same pace, but now that I'm living, not merely surviving, I don't care how quickly time goes by because I'm actually enjoying it and it feels sooooooo much better than it did that I don't even care it's passing by more quickly. I'm just living in the present moment, taking it all in, soaking up every precious moment for what it is. Good, bad, or neutral, I'm just grateful to be living it, not only surviving it.
When I arrived at Table Rock Lake, taking the scenic route I might add (yes, that means perhaps I was listening to music more than the Map voice and didn't go straight and instead veered off to the right), but even with that, it felt like I was on the right road as I pulled around a corner and saw this beautiful sunset.
While I knew the sun always set rather quickly, this experience made me realize just how quick as I was racing to get back on the right road and inside the condo I rented in time to see what the sunset was like from the deck there. I literally ran inside and made it onto the deck just in the nick of time to capture this video. After I caught my breath from running up a few flights of stairs, there was no sound except that of a few animals rustling around below and a bird in the distance. And there it was, I had instant peace in my soul.
On the 5.5-hour drive earlier that day, I kept seeing ponds that still appeared to be solid ice. It caught my attention because we had already had a couple warm days, so it surprised me they would still be as frozen as they were. I drove by several and felt I should have taken a photo for someone reason, but I didn't turn around until seeing this one as I was driving by going about 75 mph. By the time there was a safe place to turn around, I had gone a couple miles. Despite the logical voice in me telling me it was silly, I still turned around and drove back. After pulling over, I couldn't get a good photo through the windshield of my car, so when I saw no cars were coming, I hopped out and took this photo. Then as I was pulling away, I snapped a photo of the temperature you can click to see next.
I have a pretty basic way of thinking, but it was just so surprising to me to think how it could be taking this long for the pond to thaw when it was this warm outside. And then as I was driving, I began to understand why I took the photo.
Last week I had dinner with a friend I hadn't communicated with for well over 30 years. Except for perhaps a brief exchange of hellos on a college campus, we hadn't had any real conversation in 37 years to be more precise. The whole story from that night will be shared in the book, and it's an amazing one, but when she described having known me back then, she shared I was "closed off." This was not a surprise to me, but several other things were. And then thinking about the photo, and when a past romantic relationship came to mind, it occurred to me that I was like the ice.
It's not just that I had an icy surface and once some heat, i.e. love, came around, I would melt. Instead, I remained solid ice inside to protect myself from pain. It's not that my behavior appeared to be cold to other people, as I've always been able to be kind and thoughtful to others, but the ice was to protect me from letting anyone else in. I could give, but I could not receive because to trust another human being, particularly a man, would subject me to pain, and that I could not bear any more of.
I had a friend who, like me, had developed his own protection against pain and while through the years we were able to help each other melt away around the edges from time to time, we couldn't yet thaw the deeply frozen parts that would have allowed us to really connect at the level I think we both wanted. We could go for long periods of time, just being friends and then we'd dip our toes into a romantic relationship again. One of us would get brave and turn up the heat hoping to melt away another layer of ice and just as quickly, the other one would get scared and nothing could chip away at that protective, solid ice layer that presented itself.
While painful at times, I couldn't be more grateful for that relationship because it taught me so much. I wouldn't be where I am today without having gone through the experience of loving him the best I could at that time. Now that I can be real with myself, I know how much more I had to do with our relationship not working at the time. I wanted to blame him, and while he wasn't perfect, I think now my icy core was even more solid than his and I had so much work left to do myself in order for anyone else to ever be able to help me melt.
At the time, it was impossible for me to see how my own fears and behaviors, created to protect myself, kept me from having the relationship I so very much wanted with him. If there was a single point in time I wish I could go back to, it was when he was standing in my kitchen and we were having one of the most honest and vulnerable conversations we ever had and he said, "I wish I was where you are," regarding my growth. In that moment, I let him think he was alone by not disclosing just how much more work I had to do, how scared I was, and how I really didn't know the first thing about how to have a healthy relationship with a man. Sure, I had made progress in many other areas of my life, but not this one. At that time, I was still solid ice through and through.
As time has gone on and I have had other friendships with men, I have begun to learn how my behaviors are not serving me well and how I can better manage them in order to perhaps one day have a healthy relationship. He always said never say never, so for now, I am simply enjoying how it feels not to be frozen anymore and am embracing the melty, slushy human I am.
If you struggle in relationships, these are two online resources I've learned a lot from reading.
For women written by Bob Grant, a Clinically Trained Relationship Expert
For men written by Jayson Gaddis, Founder of the Relationship School
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