This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I’d made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine.
To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion.
I felt it in a way I hadn’t in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.
I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.
My love for him was indisputable, but my allegiance to him wasn’t.
He reminded me of all the golden boys I’d known in my life- classically handsome and charmingly sure of his place at the very top of the heap, confident that the world was his and that he was safe in it, without ever having considered otherwise.
But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again.
I’d imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I’d thought I’d weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips.
I knew that her love for me was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things beyond that.
He was the first person I’d met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn’t need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.
The same as she’d always done when she’d seen me suffer because I wanted something to be different than it was and she was trying to convince me with that single word that I must accept things as they were.
I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The.
Sometimes those we forgive continue being the jackasses that they always were and we accept them while keeping them approximately three thousand miles away from our wedding receptions.
Accounting for what happened in our childhoods and why and who our parents are and how they succeeded and failed us is the work we all do when we do the work of becoming whole, grown-up people.
Each and every one of those people rose at a moment in their lives – one that is very much like this moment in your life, “suffocated” and at that moment they chose to tell the truth about themselves instead of staying “safe” inside the lie.
But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I’d never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.
We’re hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we’re falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won’t stick.
I was intrigued. I was unattached. In my youth and sorrow, I was ready to self-destruct. So.
As I passed them, I felt the presence of my mother so acutely that I had the sensation that she was there; once I even paused to look around for her before I could go on.
The question isn’t whether you should stay or go. The question is: How would your life be transformed if you chose to love this time with all your intelligence?