Loving is something to never take for granted.
There are two distinct memories from my early childhood when my father would make his every other weekend visits. One was being taken to the park to ride on the miniature train. That’s a child’s fun remembrance. The other memory is laying back with him on the hood of the car parked by the side of the road at the airport and watching the planes land (back in the ’60’s, when you could park that close to an airport). How long did a preschooler lay still on a car hood between jets? That’s a memory an adult hangs on to. My very young and probably broke father was trying to find a cheap way to spend time with his son who he knew he had already lost.
“Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.” ―
Most of what comes out of us as adults has been automatically “wired” into us through our early experiences in life. I think it’s impossible to be deliberate in each decision we make about every response, choice and attitude toward others. Patterns get laid down with all our early interactions with parents, teachers and peers. These ways of thinking and feeling help us to unconsciously organize our sense of self. This process works out well for most. Some people can get trapped in patterns that are dysfunctional.
How we go about loving (or not) is mostly automatic. Expressions and experiences are typically not conscious but internalized routines. For me, my early environment was not always one in which learning how to love was automatically normalized for everyone involved. As I look back, maybe it was a foreign concept? As an adult, I haven’t been very successful at doing what comes natural (“nurtural”) for most people concerning loving relationships. Instead, I have had to try and be much more conscious and work on it – a lot of trial and error (mostly error). Usually learning about it academically and watching others.
I’m sitting here right this moment actually looking at a real Rocky Mountain. Surrounded by a breathtaking landscape, it makes me wonder about the things I’ve missed because I just wasn’t looking. Or just didn’t know how to feel? The other side of automatic love could be automatic indifference. When people don’t really know how to love other people, and don’t know that they don’t know, life is lived in a gray sort of twilight. Thanksgiving dinner with no side dishes!
All of us have know people who aren’t very good at relationships. Probably because they didn’t get the chance, early on, to have love wired into their thinking and feeling. They just need more time, forgiveness, space and extra syrup on their pancakes. Some people may not understand this about themselves and end up living unloved lives because they don’t know how to do anything else. I hope you can find within yourself the abundance to keep loving, in demonstrative ways, someone like this in your life. They mostly don’t know how bad they need it.
“You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.” ―
From up here on the hilltop at this point in my life, I see the reason love was so hard to find and then give. Because it wasn’t automatic. These days, due to circumstances, I’ve made a promise to love my children and grandchildren twice as hard. That’s a task and treat. But I know it’s even twice as hard for someone like me, who needs to be rewired. This project will go on and on in me, like searching for the Holy Grail, but I deeply know it’s worth every step in the right direction.
“I no longer believe love works like a fairy tale but like farming. Most of it is just getting up early and tilling the soil and then praying for rain. But if we do the work, we just might wake up one day to find an endless field of crops rolling into the horizon. In my opinion, that’s even better than a miracle. I’d rather earn the money than win the lottery because there’s no joy in a reward unless it comes at the end of a story.” ―
The Invisible Man 