My back patio at sunset, on a beautiful October day.
The last six weeks have been full of epiphanies, but I’ve kept them mostly to myself or shared them with a very limited number of people rather than here. They’ve been mainly for me, just me–at least while I’ve been sorting through them to find the biggest epiphany of all.
I’ve also been forced–in a good way, I suppose–to look back at my most significant romantic relationships throughout my life. What I’ve found has definitely made me squirm.
I’m glad now that I’ve kept a journal through several significant relationships because many of the finer details would have gone forgotten, not because they weren’t important but because I’d thought those things were gone forever from my life and it was just easier to package them up and put them on a shelf in a locked room in the basement of my heart than to look at them every day and intentionally live in the past. Reading those journals now leave me a bit astonished to see what was important to me in those relationships then. I have for a long, long time tried to catalog what I like about someone–though I very rarely share it with the guy. It’s just my way of showing all the ways I connect with a person that are incredibly meaningful to me, but this is where I’ve been off-track in the past. I have associated those attributes with the person rather than with myself and what really “does it” for me.
And where those relationships have faded has been often in the fading of those attributes. It doesn’t matter how exquisite a man’s intelligence is or his rare ability to dish about Life, Death, and the Universe…if his ability to be honest with me vanishes or is overcome by alcohol abuse or some other 180-degree turn in his nobility, then the relationship fades and even when he returns to my life (they ALWAYS do), I’m not interested anymore because he’s no longer the person he was with me when I fell in love and I don’t want to go back to whom I was in the past that he fell for because it’s a lesser version of me now and he hasn’t been around to grow and change with me. My failing has been in attaching those beautiful attributes to that person, even when the person has changed. There is no going back because I don’t want to go back, only forward.
The biggest epiphany of all is that to attract love, prosperity, career, and more to me is to stick with the attributes and not worry about who the person is who presents himself as a bearer of those traits. The Universe provides many opportunities for someone with those attributes to arrive in my life, present himself to me, bond and grow with me–but the trick is, I have to be open to allowing the Universe to fill that order for me in a more perfect way than I dreamed, more perfect certainly than that man from my past returning to me but with all those embitterments over where we failed in the past. When spiritual teachers talk of attracting the right person to you, there are many possibilities for a right person, but not if you don’t allow a right person to come to you in favor of holding that space for someone in the past. These teachers tell you to ask for your “someone,” not for a partiular someone, because you allow for something (or someone) better than you could have imagined. As long as you are thinking of a particular someone and not ready to move on, someone better isn’t going to show…or if they do, you’ll just miss it.
I’ve chosen this past spring to move forward, not look back, and let the Universe surprise me. I’ve told myself that I won’t judge, that I’ll just allow, that I’ll see how things unfold beautifully and how the future takes care of itself. Sometimes it takes a while for that kind of thing to line up, and then again, you can look back and see how it’s been lining up for a long time and you didn’t realize it, had no idea, and it seems to be out of the blue. Lightning can strike the same place twice, definitely, and even more, and when it does, it really lights up the sky.
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