Learning to Love: Change

Yesterday, we had a memorable dinner to celebrate my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary!!! (…talk about learning to overcome everyday hardships, to distill love, borne from patience).
Anthropologists argue that man is, by ‘’nature, monogamous, but only for an approximate seven years at a time (corresponding to those, needed by children to develop to the point of no longer needing taking-care-of). Anyone aspiring to a marriage “till death do us part”, requires ‘supernatural’ help, hence marriages, before God. My parents thusly, learned to muscle virtue and have lasted sixty years together! Of course it hasn´t been easy. Challenges, worth overcoming, never are. However, it is these daily conflicts that give us opportunities for growth. To wrestle with them we have to ‘change’.
The debate about ‘change’, whether it be ‘immanent’, ‘permanent’ or just ‘potential unfolding’, has been going on since Aristotle through Hegel, Kant...to the present day. Do we actually ‘change’ or is it just the unraveling of personal development? Can we ‘change’ our essence? Does ‘change’ depend on free will or is it conditioned by ‘nature’? Can a loved one actually ‘change’ to overcome his innate shortcomings and transcend his ‘natural’ imperfection? Can we trust that our giving second and third chances to those who have let us down, will actually make a difference? What does ‘change’ depend on?

We all have loved ones who have collapsed the inflated expectations we had of them, through disillusion. Can we ever expect them to ‘change’? If so, how much longer must we wait? (I would like to believe God would say “Forever. That´s why I made eternity”…but it may just be wishful thinking).

I was impressed with the number of people asking these same questions, at a workshop in self-growth, I gave, recently. Their main concern was not about themselves, but about loved ones caught up in mediocrity, ignorance and self-deprecation (or should I say ‘de-prickation’!). These innate ‘care-takers’ have been trying, over and over again, to love loved- ones who feel unworthy of ‘ being loved’ and just end up rejecting  help. It is this dejection that seems to have them ‘give up’ and harden to loving, cynically responding to it with sneers of disbelief (I know, because I have been there!)
My parents have mutually let each other down, over and over again, but have both held tight to their ‘ideal’, confident of change. It is this ‘unwitting trust’ that Love is made of. It’s about ‘believing ’patiently, over and beyond evidence, in the potential of our Higher Selves. It is about trusting ‘change’.
My tendency to ‘doubt’, till Science and evidence proves ‘otherwise’ , strongly objects to such belief in ‘change’. People ‘are’ as they ‘are’ and their acts speak for themselves. Such doubting renders  anything else, a ‘wishful projection’.  However, having myself, been one of those loved ones who rejected loving, for whatever reasons  and ‘changed’, I now stand up for the silent dis-believers, confident that they too, will ‘change’. My parents’ example is my avowal and evidence that proves change is possible.

 

L'earning to Love. Trust

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Lesson Trust

People are mean. But people are also kind. The human heart holds both. We each decide. We have to know them, both to develop discernment, which is the capacity to sift through life and identify right from wrong.
The word mean, can ‘mean’ so many things.. ‘purpose or intention’;  ‘miserly or stingy’; a ‘mathematically average’; or ‘cruel and spiteful’…Rounding them all: it is somebody miserly with the intention of responding spitefully when a fair average has been abused. Whatever the justification, it is wrong. We respond with hatred and destruction, when wronged, going against people who are ‘in the light’; much as turning jealousy into envy. In jealousy we desire that, which someone else has, working for and protecting it. In envy, one desires what someone else has, but thinking oneself undeserving, we chose to destroy those who do have it. Meanness turns evil when we destroy happiness in others.

Meanness, hatred, evil and destruction all start from anger, gone rotten from repression and resentment. ‘Angrrrr’ is an emotional response of defense and protection. It may be a response against something that wrongs us from without, or from within. We can be angry with ourselves or with others. Repressed anger churns bile, vile. We replay the same memory of injustice and pain, hurting more and more, with growing ‘re-sentiment’. Cowardice makes us weak and secretly vengeful. So we weave stories that justify our feelings in self-delusion, lying to ourselves and others, till we believe them. We seek the company of those who become accomplices, believing and sharing our lies, while we shun those who question us. That is when we lose the guiding compass that identifies right from wrong. Internalized pain makes us mean, defensively attacking those that seem to menace our self-righteous façade with righteousness. We ‘harden’ our hearts and become insensitive to others, while developing hypersensitivity of our own internalized suffering.

Righteous anger channels that same energy constructively, developing the ‘cou-rage’ and fortitude, needed to confront that, which is damaging. We must resist meanness in our own heart and avoid evil, manifest. It is foolish not to recognize that evil can destroy our ‘god-ness’.

We need evil to know kindness, much as we need darkness to identify light. Perhaps the human saga is about neutralizing both opposites to find a happy medium that integrates them both. That is Love. It can only happen opening the heart and trusting we can love someone who wrongs us despite the pain; trusting that beneath the evil façade is kindness, wronged; trusting that behind the black clouds of a storm is the Sun.