Caroline and I were watching TV the other night when we lost interest and turned to each other. It was just one of those things—we were on the same page and grateful for it. Sounds a bit dreamy, I suppose, but it was special. Then her eyes welled up. I reached for her hand and waited for her to speak.
“I was just thinking,” she said. “Each day we’re together, each moment—it’s one less.”
I know exactly where she’s coming from, and feel the same way. Like her I spent too many years with the wrong person, trying against all odds to make it work.
Those moments of exquisite happiness seem to come with searing pain built right in, don’t they? You can’t have one without the other. Most of the time, things hum along normally and we don’t notice the underlying stress of life, but it’s always there.
Very interesting, it makes me think what is more dangerous thing to do, facing up to the underlying stress of life or ignoring it?
I know what I do, I ignore it, but at what cost?
The cost of not facing it is a mind filled with strategies of avoidance and restless thoughts. Facing reality, on the other hand, undermines our illusions and clarifies every moment.
It is wonderful for those of us who have a partner who we can be totally open and ourselves with. The broad path makes one realize just how truly deep, pure, warm and touching love at times can be. Just maybe those moments are glimpses of the enlightened state.
Love is truest when it’s free, and nothing quite frees it like the recollection of mortality.
A few years ago when sitting with my wife, I has a sense of something similar. That each moment we have a chance to do or say something loving or not. And that there are a finite number of moments in this life, and if we choose the non-loving action, that is a moment lost. But if we choose the loving words or touch or thought, that moment is somehow not really lost, it is connected to all the other loving moments, past and future. Whether in lives past or lives to come, I can’t know. But the loving moments seem to connect to something much less limited and limiting than myself…
Thanks Charles; I’m enriched by your story. Nothing has greater value than being present to our own consciousness; that itself is an act of love from which we all benefit.