perspective

Tonight I keep thinking about losing things.

People feel loss when they lose things that have deep meaning, or that are tied to memory. Like if you had something valuable, some toy or gift someone gave you, and you lost it or broke it. You'd feel sad of course but you'd have to come to grips with your involvement in it. Maybe you were careless with it.

Sometimes loss comes at the hands of a universe that's unfair, and our control really is limited. Loss of a family member or of a family can take this shape. The pain experienced there can be the worst, depending on how a person reacts to it. The first instinct is sadness and anger, and resistance-- resistance to any force in the universe that would allow something so terrible to happen. And your world pivots and everything else has to readjust in the wake of what you now know about the universe, once you've accepted it that is. That can take years, but thats part of a natural process.

For me, the worst is a careless loss, assuming you have the insight to figure out why it was careless. When we get attached to things or people, we stake our well-being on their status, with people that could mean how they're feeling or if they're angry.

The emotions of the people you love are like a magnet the more you care for them, and they can pull you away from the person you really are. It will seem like the right thing to do at the time, to react to whatever is being shown to you-- either to show that you have lines or boundaries, or just to show passion that you're upset and angry too, that you care. But it's a mistake.

You can't trump anger or scorn with an equal show of either. To love someone, understand them first.

The people you love will get upset at you, but they get upset for a variety of reasons. They don't always (usually not, actually) get upset at you for the reasons YOU are upset at you. Every person has a million secret reasons to tear themselves down, and probably very few of them are shared by the people that care about them. Maybe they've had a bad day, maybe they miss you, or maybe they're just waiting for you to show them real compassion and sympathy in return. They want you to show the kind of person you really are again.

You have to take yourself out of the equation. If you can't live in the moment and see things for how they are, if you can't break out of living in reaction like this, you will lose the most important things in your life by pushing them away from you.

But those are the risks we take when we let people in. Every time you're in conflict, a person decides whether they want to push the person they love away or pull them closer, but most of the time we don't see it that way.

But making those mistakes is the only way to grow. And regret can be a tool if you use it properly, I think. I hope.

That's all for tonight. peace

Ryan