Break the cycle

You’ve heard this: Hurt people hurt people. It is your choice whether to break that cycle. Suffering is optional. If someone has hurt you, the wound in your heart will hurt like hell when you address it, but only for a little while, until you let it go. Then it can heal. And scar tissue tends to be much stronger than the original flesh. But an untended wound will fester and infect every aspect of your life. It can do this without you being consciously aware of it. You will then become the hurt person who hurts people. So let it go. Identify it, feel it, then let it go. Whatever it was, whatever that cruel person did, has nothing to do with you, with anything you do or did. You were just close at hand, is all. If the person who hurt you had had someone else close at hand—someone not you—he would have done exactly the same thing. Because the thing that caused him to hurt you was not you. It was his own hurt. How you respond to it is entirely up to you. As soon as you know this in your heart—for real and not just as something you want to believe—you can let go. There are lots of professionals who can help you do this, along with family and friends you trust. But you can also do it by yourself. Yes, you are enough.

Loneliness is thirsty out at sea

And watching silent teardrops as they sink

With water for as far as eyes can see

But not a single drop that you can drink

Happiness is standing in the sun

With every new day drinking in the dew

And feeling as though life has just begun

And every single moment is for you

It doesn’t belong to you, personally

When those you love become lost, their behavior is not who they are.  If they become enveloped in darkness, they may not be able to produce anything but darkness.  They may try to draw you into it, using your love as the tether.  They may direct life-or-death, world-ending statements at you, because their pain makes them believe their very life is at stake.  Until they deal with their own pain, negativity will exude from them in all directions.  See it for what it is, an outward expression of pain.  It doesn’t belong to you, personally. 

Saving Virtue

I dreamed that I made my way through a rainy, crowded city to the public bandstand, where I had previously placed piles of our (mine and my daughter’s) clean, folded laundry.  Only the top layer of laundry was wet from the rain, so it wasn’t the total loss it could have been, but we had to figure out how to save the laundry and prevent the need to do it over.  We knew we couldn’t balance the piles of laundry if we attempted to carry them.  So we donned all of the clothes simultaneously and wore them away from the bandstand, toward dry quarters.  If dirty laundry is a metaphor for vice, then clean, folded laundry is a metaphor for virtue.  Virtue is not for public display, but to be worn like clothing.  We can’t carry it around like a parcel; we have to take it on.