The Web of Life

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipt them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherish'd by our virtues." ~ William Shakespeare All’s Well That Ends Well

I’ve been blogging now for just about two years. As I go back and reread all the entries, the emotions and events come flooding back and I am able to evaluate growth and weaknesses that I have experienced and to what extent I have changed. Change is an essential element to a better and emotionally healthy life. The process of life is to find purpose in the journey but more importantly to seek the joy that life offers. That can be so hard sometimes. We can easily be overwhelmed by our own expectations as well as cultural demands that others place on us. Balance is the key and one must never assume that once you’ve found it that it will always be there. The scales of life shift constantly and finding balance is always an ongoing process.

I have come at this very principle full throttle these last few days and I have had a tumultuous few weeks. Here’s what I am on about.

Winter just doesn’t want to leave us here in the Great White North. It’s May 2010 and we are still having weather warnings and winter storm warnings and it makes you wonder; is it ever going to end?

Lately, my life has felt like that. Just when I thought I had all the doubts licked they are plaguing me again and I have to bind myself is all the positive energy I can muster and purge the “what ifs”. The oxymoron here is I have never had the kind of happiness I have experienced these past few months ever in my life so I find myself in near utter confusion. How can someone be so happy and be stalked by doubt. I’m not saying doubt in my new life but the kind of doubt that reaches deep within your soul that makes you wonder if everything you have accomplished emotionally is really just a house of cards ready to fall down. Do others have moments like this?

I know where my fears lie. The “what if’s” are stalking me and I am doing all that I can do eliminate them from my thought processes. I had this under control and “out of control” it turns me into something I am not content with. Yikes, I need to find the strength that pulled me through these last few years and understand new life as compared to old life. The consoling part of this equation is that I know I have it in me, I know I can rise above this. I know it’s there.

I can give you all the reasons why my life became unbalanced again but lets suffice it to say that I let the opinions of others get under my emotional skin. I may not ever measure up to some but that’s not important because measuring up to myself is much more valuable and knowing who I am helps tremendously with that. Maybe I started to loss sight of that. Maybe I let the door open to the doubt. Goodness knows I have had that lesson taught to me a bazillion times.

So last night as I was talking to my wonderful, beautiful, accepting and cherished new husband and he was again showing immense patience at the incongruity of my thoughts he said the most amazing thing and just like that, I got it. Wow, I can’t even describe the feeling I had as I realized that as crazy as I sounded he understood and without criticizing we found a solution together. He in turn spoke to his anxieties and the back and forth of emotional acceptance and understanding began melting me more into love with him, as if that could even be possible, more in love, and yet I was.

“It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”
~ George Elliot – Middlemarch

When you spend a good portion of your life with the paradigm of fault being the constant reference getting out of that rut can be a bit of a process. I would be remiss if I didn’t fully acknowledge healing and growth and wonder at a new and better life. Today, I said to my beautiful sister, that W was easy as a husband. That’s neither a fault nor a put down. W is easy because he loves fully, forgives easily and expects only what he gives. When he’s mad, you know, when he’s happy, he’s infectious and when he loves, it makes you feel safe. For so many years, all I ever wanted was to feel safe. Each day I am greeted by a text or a phone call and it is from my BEST FRIEND. Through out the day we text and call and in the evening, he is generally the last person I speak to. I never grow tired of his jokes or his words of advice or encouragement and I love his patience with me. He’s says I tell him 10 times I am going to do something before I actually get it done but that I do get it done eventually. I love that once is all I have to ask so I need to be careful what I ask for.

Now, please don’t assume that this new life of mine is all roses and cream. We are getting used to each other and the main difference is in the effort. W isn’t perfect and I am even farther from it but we know that, we actually get that and we find such humor in the kerfuffle’s that we find ourselves in. The other day, we went for a ride to Waterton Park. We had finished and the shortest way home was to turn left. The unknown was right and a much farther drive. As I was sitting there, I turned to him and asked, want to go on an adventure? Sure enough, the answer was yes. That’s what I love most about him. The adventure!