when you're too afraid to fight.
Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful. It is like a plough that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant. Every time you experience the pain of rejection, absence, or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide not to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds. The more you have loved and have allowed yourself to suffer because of your love, the more you will be able to let your heart grow wider and deeper. When your love is truly giving and receiving, those whom you love will not leave your heart even when they depart from you. They will become part of yourself and thus gradually build a community within you. Those you have deeply loved become part of you. The longer you live, there will always be more people to be loved by you and to become part of your inner community. The wider your inner community becomes, the more easily you will recognize your own brothers and sisters in the strangers around you. Those who are alive within you will recognize those who are alive around you. The wider the community of your heart, the wider the community around you. Thus the pain of rejection, absence, and death can become fruitful. Yes, as you love deeply the ground of your heart will be broken more and more, but you will rejoice in the abundance of the fruit it will bear. -Henri J.M. Nouwne
this doesn't necessarily pertain to my life, but i think it's interesting...
When you first meet somebody, you find out they like you, first of all, a friend of a friend of theirs say, he or she really really likes you, and it kills you, floors you, sends you to the ground, you've got to pick yourself up off the ground.
Then you get their phone number and you call them up, right, and you say "Yeah, that's a really great phone conversation, can I see you some time?" and then they say this, they say, "I'd like that." Nothing feels better than "I'd like that". So now, your blood pressures' goin, you're six feet off the ground, you can't sleep, because of "I'd like that".
So then you hang out for a while, and you call and you talk on the phone all the time, and then you drop the bomb, what feels like the bomb, you say, "You know what, I've been thinkin about you a lot." And she goes, "Ahhhhhhh!" And you go "What happened?" and she goes, "I'm sorry, I just, I just, I just, that's, I've been thinking about you too." Bam Higher into the sky. But now "I'd like that." Psh. Done. Now you're up to "I'm thinkin about you."
Then however number of months pass, it makes you feel comfortable saying it, you say "I gotta tell you something." They go "What?", you go "I'm in love with you." And nothing in the world sounds better than "I'm in love with you." And then maybe she starts crying, or maybe he goes "*gasp*". And all the sudden you're like "I'm in." But now what doesn't work?; "I'd like that." and "I've been thinkin about you." Now we're at "I'm in love with you." Then maybe some day it'll move up to "I love you." Fast forward, now you're like "I love you a lot; I love you more than anything in life." Now "I love you." doesn't work. It's a threshold that keeps movin up.
Fast forward, like six months, six weeks, whatever the case may be, now you're on like, "I want to marry you." "I want to impregnate you with my love." "I wanna, I wanna just send my love to you." "Damn it, words don't work anymore." And then you say this line....haha... and you know, you know you've used this line before, "I just wish they'd put a new word in the dictionary bigger than love because love just doesn't describe what I feel."
And so now he or she starts askin, "Do you love me?" and you start goin, "Of course I love you." "Well say it." And then it becomes "Say it twice." And it goes "Say it three times."
And then, you cross a really interesting point, where all the sudden it becomes "I hate you, I hate you." And you go, "Oh my god she hates me." And now it's like "I hate you more than anything." And then it's like "We're over." And then they go "No we're not." And you go "Yes we are." Now the words completely do not work at all, you're left with nothing. You're throwing punches under water. You're done...
You know what the moral of that story is, (if there is one).... Never, ever, ever, ever underestimate the power of "I'd like that."
so, i've been trying to update this thing forever, but i always stop halfway through.
