LOVE'S PRACTICAL LESSON

Life is nothing, if not a practical teacher.
Put your hand on a hot stove and the burn will teach you to never do that again. Take a gravelly corner too fast on your bike and the torn and bruised flesh will leave scars that teach an equally indelible lesson. Exercise too much and too hard before your body is ready and the aching, stiff joints and muscles will be a steady reminder that you made a mistake.
Open your heart to the wrong person and the hurt will teach you to never, ever do that again.
And if you think these valuable lessons are taught only to the young, think again, my friend. Age is not the same as experience, and experience is the great teacher here. You may be young and have lived through enough hurts and painful lessons to be wiser than a less experienced senior citizen. Life is not prejudiced toward the aged, saving all of its wisdom just for them. It hands out these lessons to everyone, regardless of age or sex or background. Rich or poor, educated or not, experience offers lessons that last a lifetime.
Ahh, but that is the rub, isn't it? For someone in the spring of their life, these lessons can be applied for decades. Learn these lessons in the fall of your life, however, and you have but years to reap the benefits. And suffer the aching pain.
So while love is not saved for just the young, neither are the painful benefits of loss and rejection. Love will come when its time is right, not when we expect it. That does not mean our love will be accepted or cherished by the recipient. We may be left standing, our shattered hearts no longer on our sleeves but in pieces in our hands, wondering why it hurts so much and what went to so horribly wrong. And there will be no answers, only loss and emptiness and sadness.
What lessons can be learned from such hurt? What will we take away from this experience?
Most will close off their hearts, locking them behind well-constructed defensive walls, down in cool, damp dungeons, as far from light and life as possible. They will seal their vulnerabilities with a detachment designed to keep the rest of the world, especially those who might just know the key to that dungeon door, at a distance. They will be the people we have met but never really get to know well, for they have been deeply hurt and refuse to suffer such hurt ever again.
Often such defenses are not built on the rocks of a single hurt but on the repeated breeches of our earliest battlements. With every hurt, with every succeeding loss, the injured repeats what soon becomes their mantra: "I will never let that happen again."
Rare is the person who can suffer these repeated losses and rejections and remain open to love and its amazing possibilities. These are resilient souls who have either a masochist's penchant for pain or who simply refuse to give up on the ultimate goal: Finding the love which they (and we all) seek. That they remain open to love does not mean they eventually will find it. Being open to love still means being open to being hurt and rejected. And more pain may be all they will get for being so willing and vulnerable.
But maybe they will get lucky and love will not only find them, but will stay with them for the rest of their lives, no matter how long or short that is.
The rest of us, however, have learned our lesson. And we'll never let that happen again.

CARE TO MAKE PLANS?

Life has a way of ensuring we never become too complacent.
It drops a tornado on us, floods our home and world, takes away our job and career, gives us a deadly disease, steals away the ones we love, just to make sure we don't start thinking about planning too far ahead.
Of course, it takes time to teach this lesson. When we are young, we make all sorts of long-term plans, many far beyond our meager reach. But, hey, if people like Bill Gates can dream big and find their dreams come true, why not us?
But even the dreams that are not so big, especially those dreams we hold tightly to simply because they seem most within our reach, time and life have a way of dashing. You may simply want to find the love of your life, the person you were born to be with, and time and life will find a way to either significantly delay that discovery, give it to you when you least expect it and are least prepared for it and/or keep it from you until you have already committed to another.
Just to prove to you, beyond all doubt, that God truly laughs when we make plans.
Or, as Issak Dinesen said in "Out of Africa:" "When God wants to punish us, He answers our prayers."
As we age, and feel the repeated stinging loss of our dreams, we begin to realize nothing ever goes as we hoped, as we wanted, as we had planned. We are far better off just living as God's pinball, bouncing from surprise to surprise, never truly stunned anymore because we have seen far too many. Even the words, "I didn't see that coming," no longer drip from our tongue because we realize we're never going to see what's coming, ever. Instead, every moment of every day of our existence is one surprise after another until the lack of a surprise becomes the greatest surprise of all.
Hey, today was a lot like yesterday. I sure didn't see that coming.
Despite this history of dashed dreams, smashed hopes and plastered plans, we can't help but hold on to a thread of hope, a sliver of a dream, a small piece of our plans. Maybe, just maybe, God will save the biggest surprise for the last, and finally let us have the one thing we want more than anything else in life: Love.
And then again, maybe He's just waiting to rip that, too, from our grasp and break it, and our hearts, into the tiniest of little shards.
Hey, you never know what will happen.
Just don't go making any big plans.

THE NOBLE COURSE

In all of the movies and television shows I watched and all of the books I read, I always admired the men who, in the face of difficulty and strong emotions, always chose the right and noble course. They would not give in to the temptress, choosing instead to love the upright and good woman. They would not choose love over duty, selfishness over selflessness.
They were examples I always wanted to follow.
And I thought I did and always could.
But I'd never really had to make the truly noble sacrifice, to bow out and let the woman I love go off without me, to face the stark reality of living the remainder of my life not only without the love I'd lived and longed for all of these years but also without the hope of ever being with her again. I realized it is one thing to believe in the noble cause and to always want to choose the noble road, but it is quite another to have to make the choice to let love go, to allow the one you love choose someone else, not you.
The hardest part of that, I think, is trying to decide when it is right to fight for the one you love and when it is right to let the one you love go. When is love best shown by standing up for the one you love and when is love's high road letting that person go? On one hand, I want to fight tooth and nail for her, to prove to her that I love her in good times and bad and will battle through thick and thin to be with her, that she is worth the pain and effort. On the other hand, I want her to know that I will not make her life miserable by not understanding that, for her, this is over, even though for me it will never be over, not even when I die. The love will go on, into the next life.
So which is the right and noble path, to fight for the one you love or to let her go? Neither offers a pleasant future -- fighting, quite possibly in vain, for a love that may well be over is to be Don Quixote instead of Cyrano deBergerac; surrendering love, giving up, means facing a future without love ever again, with lingering doubts about what might have been if only I had fought for us or, worse yet, if I'd only done something different during the time we were together.
The choice always seems so clear in print, in a movie, on television. But, like so many things, life is far more complicated and complex than it is crystallized for our mass consumption. The world, even in Technicolor, is never black and white. There are those gray areas that challenge us and make us wonder which way to turn. To fight for love or surrender it forever? Which is the noble, right and true path? And which will serve her best?
I wish I knew.

WHAT WOULD YOU CHOOSE?

If happiness stood before you, if everything you ever wanted in a relationship -- love, romance, spontaneity, companionship, humor, collaboration, trust, sharing, shared interests, tenderness, beauty and passion -- was right in front of you, you'd grab for it, right?
Who among us does not want to find that one person, that perfect partner with which to spend the rest of our lives? Who would walk away from the chance at bliss? At happiness? At being with your soulmate, your better half, the one person who completes you?
Ahh, but what if that came with the knowledge that it will not last, that what you see before you will be with you for a year or two and then slowly fade away until, at the end, the love has turned to hate and he/she will loathe the thought of you and run as far from you as he/she can?
Would you still want those few years, those precious memories, those shared moments? Or would you rather not reach that mountaintop nirvana because the coal mine of despair awaits at the end? Is even a brief glimpse of love, of that one perfect relationship, worth the price you would have to pay? And if you love the other person would you also rather not put them through the end? Would you rather they not carry around the hate they will have for you? Wouldn't it be better for them and for you if the two of you never even meet?
There is, of course, a flaw in this self-argument. In order for the relationship to end in agony, it must start. And you must love him/her, or else all of this is mere conjecture, pure theory. You can't know, when a relationship starts, where it might be going. You can't see that it will end "happily ever after" or in a bitter, spite-laced conversation. All you can do is risk your heart, risk your future, risk your hopes, risk your dreams. You could end up a big winner, taking the jackpot -- love for a lifetime -- or you could end up broke and broken in the street with nothing left and nothing to look forward to.
So you can live your life as a hermit -- literally or figuratively -- and take no such risk and claim it is all in order to spare the one you might love, and yourself, from the potential sorrow of a relationship that does not last. Or you can choose to love and risk the piercing ache of longing and loss, of emptiness and ending, of sorrow and sadness over one you still love with all of your heart, mind, soul and body, who no longer wants to see you, talk to you, hear about you, acknowledge you, today or evermore.
Every day there is a choice to be made.
Which will it be?

JUST NOT ENOUGH

When you finally screw up the courage to call her, to find out how she is and to let her know that you care, that you still love her, that she remains the center of your life, she lets you know that she can have no more contact with you. A relationship with you is part of her past and she is moving forward.
Without you.
It is like a punch to the gut, this news. You sensed things were strained, were difficult, but you assumed the two of you would find a way, your love would survive. Now, in the space of mere seconds, before your mind can respond with anything more than a stunned, deadpan "okay," she has turned your world dark. As in scary dark. Frightening dark. Imposing dark. I-can't-see-where-I-am-going dark.
Before the phone call ends, before you even realize that you have not told her half of what you wanted to say, you tell her that all you want is the very best for her.
And then, in the click, she is gone. Forever.
You had hoped against all hope that you would be the very best for her.  Apparently she doesn't think so.
As your rattled mind and aching heart struggle to grasp the news, deal with this turn of events, emotions ebb into a deep sadness and a yearning for death. The end, after all, seems so welcoming once there is no reason to go on living. It would be far easier to be dead than to spend another second on this planet knowing there will be no future with her. You consider ways in which to hasten the end. You could drive into a bridge abutment (you don't want to hurt someone else on the way out), except there are none on your drive home from work. You could swerve into traffic once you're back on your bike. That would be effective, so you give it serious consideration. Maybe you could just find a very dangerous job and get hired to do it. Photographer in a war zone. Digging up land mines. Something like that.
Mostly, though, you just want to run away, to be anywhere but here. Here there are far too many reminders of what you had with her, her existence, her reality. The loss hits you everywhere you turn. Here is where we shared a first kiss. Here is where you first held her. Here is where you used to meet. There's the bar where you shared drinks. Under this bridge she once stopped you, just to give you a kiss. She couldn't wait. Bittersweet reminders assault you from every corner of this place. Better to leave and start over somewhere else, where no one knows you and you know no one and nothing. Where everything will be fresh and new.
But you can't do that overnight, so eventually the hurt and the sadness and the loss holds you awake, giving you the yin to the yang of the night when she first told you that she cared for you. This night is its bookend. Where one kept you awake riding on a wave of happiness and disbelief, this one keeps you awake with the dull ache of a broken heart and the gnawing chasm of emptiness within. When sleep finally does come it is fitful and offers no real rest.
When you awaken, the reality of what happened remains and it follows you around wherever you go. Eventually the hurt forms itself into words, words you now want to share with her, so she can read just how much she has wounded you. So you write them down, thinking to leave them somewhere she can find them, so she will realize how deeply she hurt you.
This is all her fault, you tell your heart. She was incapable of loving or of being loved. That's what was wrong.
You're only fooling yourself. The truth is harsher and harder than that. The truth is you were not enough for her -- not enough of a man, not enough of a friend, not enough of a listener, not enough of a lover, not important enough, not vital enough, not young enough, not smart enough, not gentle enough, not kind enough, not spontaneous enough, not creative enough, not supportive enough, not sensitive enough, not wise enough, not there enough, not accessible enough. You just were not enough.
Because if you were enough, if you were important, and vital, and smart, and gentle, and kind, and spontaneous, and supportive, and sensitive, and wise, and accessible and everything else she needed and wanted in a man, she would not be able to walk away from you. She would put you and the relationship first. And the two of you still would be together, somehow.
But you were none of the things she needed, regardless of how she was when the two of you were together. You were fun while it lasted, exciting for a while, enough for the moment, okay for  now. You were not enough, though, to stick with forever, to risk the future on, to choose to be with today and all the rest of your shared tomorrows.
So as your heart aches, as your guts remain tied in knots, as the siren's song of death calls to you, don't blame her. This is not her fault, nor is it her problem. The problem simply is you.
You were not enough.

WAITING AT THE CEMETERY

I sat under the sprawling arms of an age-old tree and let the sun warm my skin. The tree stood at the edge of a quiet rural cemetery. And I sat under it because my bike had developed a flat rear tire. I had no spare tube nor any way to inflate one if I'd remembered to pack one in the small seat bag. But I'd put my cell phone in my jersey pocket so I called my oldest son to come get me (his car has a bike rack on the roof). Then I just waited.
In many ways, I thought, I am waiting on the outside edge of a cemetery. Literally and figuratively. I was waiting for him to drive by so I could flag him down and get a ride home. And I am waiting, spiritually and figuratively, for my life to end and so enter into a cemetery. Not this particular cemetery, mind you, but that place we all go at death.
I could have nursed the flat tire back home -- some 15 miles or more -- but that would destroy the tire and possibly damage the wheel. I know because I have done this before. I opted for the more economical, but easily also more embarrassing phone call and wait for a ride.
I could rage against the passage of time, dress like today's teens, grow my hair long again, buy a sports car, find a 20-something "girlfriend" and burn the physical, mental and spiritual candle at both ends, day and night. But that would destroy a lifetime of learning as well as take a terrible toll on the very health on which I rely. I know this because I lived through that when I was in my teens and 20s. I know this because I periodically stepped back into that way of life when work demanded 24-hour-plus shifts or the rare gathering lasted until the wee hours of the lightening morning. I prefer to act my age, for the most part, and accept that I am old and growing older with increasing speed, even if that means I no longer am attractive to women because of thinning, graying hair, the lines age sculpts onto a face and a body unable to fight gravity as it did when young and supple.
So I sit under a tree, on the "living" side of the fence surrounding a cemetery, and wait. Either someone will come along and save me, offering me a love to last me until my dying day, or I may just open those gates and head inside.
After all, given enough time, the grass eventually does look a lot greener on the other side.

SAME OR DIFFERENT?

What, I often wonder, brings couples together? What, I think as I look at two people in love, did he see in her, or her in him? I don't mean those questions as mean or malicious, but as a statement of curiosity. I truly want to know what brings any two people together into a relationship. When he first looked at her, what did he see that drew him in her direction? When she first looked at him, what attracted, or repelled, her?
If, as the saying goes, opposites attract, then shouldn't we be drawn to people who've endured a completely opposite childhood? If I grew up with an alcoholic, abusive parent then I should be attracted to someone who comes from an Ozzie-and-Harriet background, right?
Well, not so fast.
See, I don't think we truly are drawn to our complete opposite, except that men are drawn to women and women to men, for the most part. And while comedians and even some writers want to point out the ways in which men and women are different -- and if you haven't noticed that we are then we need to sign you up for both a refresher biology course and far more interpersonal relationships with the opposite (see!) sex -- we are and probably should be drawn more to our similarities than our differences.
Study after study has shown, for instance, that the male who was the eldest in his family often weds a female who was eldest in her family, and youngest child marries youngest child. And people who grew up in big families are drawn to someone who grew up in a big family. People who grew up in wealth tend to wed others who shared a similar background.
Of course, no two people are ever completely alike and so there are always going to be differences, no matter what our backgrounds are. And it is those subtle and smaller differences, I think, that we tend to focus on too often while ignoring the commonalities and similarities.
That said, we sometimes -- and I speak here from hard-won experience -- dismiss the glaring, large, ominous differences with someone because we bought into that whole "opposites attract" line. I think too often people connect, wed or just pour themselves into relationships with people so fundamentally different from themselves simply because they believe that is what they are supposed to want. Just like society has and continues to hammer into our minds that women and men must look some idealized, stylized way (men with layer upon layer of muscles, perfect teeth and hair and chiseled jaws; women with Barbie-like bodies, too much makeup, perfect teeth and skin and long, polished nails and hair), so, too, have we swallowed -- hook, line and sinker -- this idea that we should be attracted to someone opposite to us.
I don't think so.
Even when I was younger I think that "opposites attract" thing sounded a little lame to me, but back then I was stunned if any woman/girl gave me so much as a glance, let alone a second look. She might have really been from Venus as far as I knew or cared, the slightest interest was all I wanted. As I've aged, though, I realize and cherish the value of a woman with whom I share interests, passions, ideas, faith, romance, friendship, companionship and many other commonalities, traits I find important to what I seek in a relationship. I don't want someone different from me. And I can't fathom why anyone would.