When was the last time you tried a new activity? Or allowed yourself the joy of unlimited energy expended on an activity you weren’t “good” at?
What would you do more of if “good at” didn’t exist?
It only exists if you decide it does.
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Letting go
“Yeah, it was hard to give up
Some things are hard to let go
Some things are never enough
I guess I only can hope
For maybe one more chance
To try and save my soul
But love
Is a long, long road
Yeah, love
Is a long, long road” -Tom Petty
The short answer to the questions posed in the last post is: wait a second-am I actually going to be provided a short answer to something? I’ve been assured I will.
Love.
Well duh. As I thought and thought last night and this morning about just HOW I was going to explain the intention behind my misguided attempts at reshaping other people’s worlds in a way that seemed logical to anyone else, the obvious had escaped me.
Love is not logical.
Love defies reason and logic, making it magical.
And magic isn’t supposed to make sense because once it makes sense it’s become something other than magic.
You don’t get on a road expecting to stay in the same place you started.
You get on a road because you’re open to traveling it, understanding that sometimes you may find yourself
- lost
- broken down
- out of gas
- seemingly aimless in your pursuits
- in need of picking up or dropping off passengers, regardless of the difficulty in letting them go
- requiring help with your navigation
- needing to take legs of the journey on your own
I’ve come to the conclusion that love is a long road best navigated by allowing yourself the abundance of grace necessary to perpetually forgive yourself and others for not always knowing where they’re headed or why. Or for wanting the other to speak OUR language instead of their own when we can’t possibly be expected to do so because
neither. of. us. knows. how.
Until we learn.
And that’s what I’m doing now. Actually, for quite some time now: learning to communicate in a language that is not my own.
Because I’ve realized that’s part of the magic of love. It’s not about making someone else’s world the way YOU think it should be. It’s about having the flexibility of mind to open your own world SO much that you’re able to recognize that there are NO SHOULD BE-s when it comes to people.
And how they think. And how they process. And how they communicate.
And how they love.
We are as we are on this long road of love- DIFFERENT by design.
As we get more miles under our belts, becoming increasingly confident in our navigational skills, the hope is that we’ll gain enough clarity to see where we’ve been and utilize our newfound perception and interpretation skills to circle back to areas meant to be revisited once we’ve learned the language.
Picking up what we missed the first time around.
Then continuing the drive.
What “wrecks” us does not destroy us- it MOVES us! And for this we say THANK YOU. ❤
You wreck me baby- yeah you break me in two. But you move me honey- yes you do. -Michael W Campbell, Thomas Earl Petty
The long road of love
“There was a girl I knew
She said she cared about me
She tried to make my world
The way she thought it should be
Yeah, we were desperate then
To have each other to hold
But love
Is a long, long road
Yeah, love
Is a long, long road” -Tom Petty
Ohhhh TommyP TommyP TommyP. 😍What I wouldn’t have given to share his physical space for a chunk of time to pick his brain and listen to his enlightened poetic insights.
Can’t do that.
But I can and do benefit from the legacy he left all of us with his art, which IMHO is one of the most beautiful things about art: its ability to transcend death. And while you may never have considered yourself an artist in the more commonly interpreted terms, I ask that you do so now.
After all, aren’t we each creating and contributing something while we’re here? ALL of us? Put a pin in that thought and take some time to consider what kind of legacy you’ll leave behind. We’ll circle back in a future post.
p.s. if your answer was $$, please dig deeper because while money is a completely useful and generous legacy to leave, you’re more than your $$ whether you realize it yet or not… but I digress.
As I’ve said many times before, music draws me in, fills my senses with its power and often leaves me with the gift of divine revelation. Something in the music or lyrics will jump out and message me, urging me to dig deeper in order to uncover something I’m missing- a puzzle piece if you will, in an area of my personal life puzzle where my progress has become challenged. In the case of this song (one of my favorites) the pieces began here:
“she tried to make my world, the way she thought it should be.”
Okay knock me over with a feather- Tommy P is on to me.
Is it true? In the words of Steve Urkel, did I do that?
Yes. But I didn’t know I was doing it.
As I alluded to in a previous post , my husband and I are a neurodiverse couple. Though we’ve been together 39 years and married for 35 of those years, our knowledge of this neurodiversity is fairly new. And while I’ve learned that our ADHD&spectrum-y blend is a rather common relationship dynamic among neurodiverse couples, it’s not something we’ve spoken about with many others. I’m not sure others who know us would understand or maybe even “believe” it in the sense that a person may not “seem” like they’re on the spectrum because the world is only just beginning to begin to understand the complexities of neurodiversity and its implications.
In other words, there’s a whole heluva lot of lonely, confused adults out there who just think they’re “bad at relationships”. Or wonder why they:
- can’t commit
- have intimacy issues
- may display a variety of what appear to be narcissistic behaviors
- are confused by reciprocity issues
- become dysregulated more easily than others
- struggle with communication
- and the list goes on…
Often these are undiagnosed adults on the spectrum. But how would they know that if they’ve never been exposed to what “on the spectrum” means? I’ll just say this:
it can mean A LOT OF VARIOUS THINGS, but let’s get back to my role in all of this and how it came to me from a song lyric.
Making somebody’s world the way I thought it should be.
sigh.
And though I first believed my tendency to “fix” began with my son and his autism diagnosis, it wasn’t long before I realized that what I was doing was something I’d always done with the people I was closest to.
Maybe even those I wasn’t close to. 😲 Sheesh.
Helping people to make their world
THE WAY I THOUGHT IT SHOULD BE.
How did I do that?
Or the even bigger question: why would I do that?
And even more importantly: how did I stop?
The road with those answers continues in my next post.
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