Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. Robert Frost says it best:
My emotion has found my thought, and my thought has found my words in the poem which I wrote this morning (see below). What are the thoughts and the words of your own emotions today? Write a poem in order to find out. You will most likely be surprised.
WHO ARE YOU?
Who are you?
Are you what your friends say? Which friend?
And does it really matter what they say, in the end?
Who are you? Are you young, or are you old?
That answer is more about the judger’s age, I’m told.
Who are you?
Do you know? Do you rely on others’ to tell you who you may be?
Or do you sit with yourself, and learn about yourself organically?
Who are you?
The answer to this question is only for you to know.
The rest is all conjecture, projection, and changes as the wind does blow.
This is how my mind works: For some crazy reason, as I was folding some laundry earlier this week, I started to think about a girl who I was friends with, in middle school. We were in a lot of the same classes and we played on the basketball team together. One day, we were being driven to practice by her mother, and I distinctly remember my friend turning around, from her front seat, looking at me, and saying how much she hated when people didn’t comb out their hair. Now, this was back in the early eighties, when a lot of us girls set our hair, in pink foam curlers, at night (you know the ones). Lovely. Just lovely. Ha! Anyway, my friend and I were no exception to the pink curler habit. Now, my friend, was a really cute girl, and she had really cute, short blond hair that she set in these pink foam curlers, every single night. And truth be told, my friend seemingly never really completely combed out any of those curls. It was something that I had actually noticed about her many times. Even that day, I had noticed a row on the back of her head, of uncombed out, blonde curls that could have easily still been molded on to the pink foam, that’s how perfectly and distinctly those curls sat, perched on the back of her head. But really, she was an adorable girl, she was my friend, and I figured that she liked to wear her hair that way.
At that moment, when my friend decided to announce that she hated uncombed hair on people, I kind of froze. My first go-to move, as any insecure, gawky, middle-school age girl would do (and honestly, probably the first go-to of any woman, of any age, who feels a little insecure about her own looks and persona, on any particular day) was to quickly finger my own hair, to make sure that I had combed it out sufficiently. My next go-to, which is always my go-to move, to this day, was to start panicking and to start over-thinking about the situation. Was this a test? What would a true friend do? Should I tell her about her own uncombed curls? Does she know about her curls, and is daring me to say something? Would this turn into an argument? Would she start counter-attacking me? Could I handle that? Was our friendship doomed over uncombed curls?
I remember deciding to just meekly agree with her and then quickly change the subject. “I know, I hate that, too. How’d you do on the English quiz?” I must have said something to this affect. But obviously and pathetically, this is an exchange that I still go over in my mind, from time to time, forty years later. (Am I alone in remembering some of this crazy, random stuff? The amount of stuff that I don’t remember scares me sometimes, but these kinds of seemingly inconsequential, quirky memories are the kinds of situations that my mind likes to catalog, and then send frequent pop-up reminders, like pop-up ads on the internet. And next, my mind goes, “Hey, this could be a blog post.” And then, here we are . . . )
As I pondered this situation, in my mind, once again, earlier this week, I thought to myself, “It really is true. Whenever we really have a visceral reaction to something, or when we decide that we have to announce that we “hate” something, there most likely, is a hint of whatever that thing is, inside of us, that we have decided to disown.” The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. If we are indifferent to something, we really don’t care about it. The things that we are indifferent about, have no meaning or interest to us. Love and hate evoke passion and strong feelings. We feel attached to the things which we love, and yes, it is true, we even feel attachment to the things which we say that we hate.
I decided that I might finally be able to put that silly memory about my friend to rest, if I memorialize it, by playing sleuth on my own self. The next time that feel the need to announce that I hate what someone else is doing, I must look for that same action in myself. I must humble myself to find it, try to correct it, and to forgive myself for 1) doing it, and 2) for projecting it completely on to someone else. I am the only “project” that I have to work on in this world. And oh my, what an eccentric, complicated, interesting, goofy, fun, intriguing project I have been assigned! The project of “me” is enough for any one lifetime. This I know.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
