Patience . . .

I beg you . . . to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer . . . Rainer Maria Rilke

Ok, raise your hand if you read this quote and feel like what she is asking is impossible!!! The first time I saw this quote, I re-read it two or three times before it sank it what she was talking about. Sometimes no matter how much we may want the answer to a question, living is the only answer there is.

Almost two years ago now, my ex and I broke up around an incidence of infidelity that turned into a relationship outside of our marriage. By the time I found out about it, she was already in love with the other person and the life we had built together was no longer important. I didn't understand then why our world was imploding. In the two years that have passed since the moment I found out, I have discovered MANY answers to the question or why through the simple act of living.

Before we began to fall apart, I was in therapy searching desperately for a deeper connection with my children. In the madness that followed the wake of our demise, I found that relationship. I came to understand that they needed me to be their Mom as much as they needed her, just in different ways. I found that I was fully capable of comforting them and providing for them on a daily basis without any help from anyone else if that was how it had to be.

Through patience, I am learning about facing the challenges of loving someone again. It has proven to be, by far, the hardest thing to do in the wake of breaking up a long term relationship. My heart is sometimes overly cautious and jaded. I find it hard to allow myself to be that vulnerable to another person again. The physical side of things has been simple compared to the challenge of opening up emotionally. Making a connection with another person and risking being hurt, rejected and/or abandoned again is so TERRIFYING. I have tried very hard to leave the damage of the relationship that ended out of my new one, but truthfully, the new relationship is somewhat a product of the old one ending, so it's very difficult to completely separate the two. It's hard not to bring the baggage that developed at the end of the other relationship into the new one because the fear is still there that the end is what I deserve, not a new beginning and that an ending will be coming along shortly to prove my theory. This has lead me to learn to be patient with myself.

I sincerely believe that God understands us so well. He knows what we need. When things in our lives are beyond our understanding, they don't remain so forever because God understands that we need to know, to keep our sanity, we need to see the purpose for our suffering. In my life, I have found, that God shows me the reason for my tradgedies. This allows me to look at my history without regret because I understand why the path had to be as it was. I am fond of saying that I would relive every moment of my life exactly as it was to be standing in exactly the same place because I would not want to have sacrificed any of the many blessings along the way. I may not have understood the reasons for the turns in the path as I walking it, but through patience, the reasons came to be clear.