I warned you that these were gonna get personal.
Two things I'm low on right now in my life: Faith and Love.
Now that's a pretty big statement. It might be more accurate to say two things that I've sacrificed for the time being are faith and love. Or two things that take more energy than I'm willing to give right now are faith and love. Or faith and love heard I was coming to town and turned off their cell phones.
Perhaps it's mature of me to say I may be too immature for them and maybe that's the first step, but that's pretty damn counterintuitive. Once upon a time, I had a lot of faith and a lot of love. I mean, really, my life has been full of so many blessings, so faith should probably be an easy thing. It sure is a great feeling, believing in what you're doing and how you're living, constantly striving for a perfection that has already been defined and at the same time, just letting go. Trusting things to fall as they will and believing they're in good hands. Trusting how you will fall and believing that you're in good hands. Having a strong sense of conscience and few question marks. Moving forward with your head down, relatively few distractions.
And maybe it's been love that's driven me from faith. If you don't share faith with someone you love, your simple life needs to change, to be more circumspect, to be more complicated, self-aware, you need to concede things, you need to adapt and change. But are you just losing yourself? In the process of my relationships, I feel like I've let my faith slip--in no way a fault of the people I was with. No one ever told me to drop it. No one ever told me I needed to stop believing in God or going to church, or else they were going to leave me. But maybe it's something we should be more aware of--do relationships need to be all about compromise or rather about understanding differences? In a world where our differences multiply on a daily basis, where everything is personalized, can we honestly expect to find someone like us, who shares our beliefs, who wants to live life in the same way. Or is this all a matter of posterity? Is this why so many divorces happen once the kids come along? Is this why kids are getting the raw deal? Do kids make us realize that we've compromised and met the other person halfway and neither of you likes the fact that the child is becoming a watered-down version of neither of you? Or is the *idea* of a kid becoming enough to scare us?
Forget the love--where'd the faith go? Or how did I separate the two? I don't know. I'm looking...
I've been in some wonderful relationships--very loving, really amazing. But I'm wondering if in the future I need to maintain a larger sense of self, or if that will just make me unhappy. Do I need to find someone like me, or do I just need to find someone I enjoy being around? And what sort of balance does that require?
But you run into another issue and that is, quite simply, gender dynamics in modern society. They haven't come as far as people like to say they have. If I'm going to go out there and be an individualist in a relationship, I need to find someone else who can handle that and do the same, especially if I honestly am looking for an equal (which I would like to think I am). Or do I just need someone identical so by our powers combined we can be happy. I guess what I've found is that the middle ground makes me unhappy. And leaves me low on faith and low on love. Which is kinda sad, especially when you try to learn lessons from diplomacy. But the error seems to be in mistaking diplomacy with compromise. I guess I'm starting to learn that some things in our lives can't be compromised. And maybe some things in our lives can't be shared completely. Or maybe we're looking for a person who can't possibly exist.
I kinda regret not getting married at like 19 or 20 (theoretically). It seems like the generations before ours had a better idea of finding happiness in simplicity. Hey, we like each other, let's get married before we figure out stupid reasons not to like each other. That said, I'm not getting married anytime soon, I'm just saying enduring love seems to take the simplest form, rather than complex social structures and overthought belief systems which just seem to undo everything positive we try to figure out.
So that's me, on the eternal quest. As I'm sure many of you are. Godspeed.
Two things I'm low on right now in my life: Faith and Love.
Now that's a pretty big statement. It might be more accurate to say two things that I've sacrificed for the time being are faith and love. Or two things that take more energy than I'm willing to give right now are faith and love. Or faith and love heard I was coming to town and turned off their cell phones.
Perhaps it's mature of me to say I may be too immature for them and maybe that's the first step, but that's pretty damn counterintuitive. Once upon a time, I had a lot of faith and a lot of love. I mean, really, my life has been full of so many blessings, so faith should probably be an easy thing. It sure is a great feeling, believing in what you're doing and how you're living, constantly striving for a perfection that has already been defined and at the same time, just letting go. Trusting things to fall as they will and believing they're in good hands. Trusting how you will fall and believing that you're in good hands. Having a strong sense of conscience and few question marks. Moving forward with your head down, relatively few distractions.
And maybe it's been love that's driven me from faith. If you don't share faith with someone you love, your simple life needs to change, to be more circumspect, to be more complicated, self-aware, you need to concede things, you need to adapt and change. But are you just losing yourself? In the process of my relationships, I feel like I've let my faith slip--in no way a fault of the people I was with. No one ever told me to drop it. No one ever told me I needed to stop believing in God or going to church, or else they were going to leave me. But maybe it's something we should be more aware of--do relationships need to be all about compromise or rather about understanding differences? In a world where our differences multiply on a daily basis, where everything is personalized, can we honestly expect to find someone like us, who shares our beliefs, who wants to live life in the same way. Or is this all a matter of posterity? Is this why so many divorces happen once the kids come along? Is this why kids are getting the raw deal? Do kids make us realize that we've compromised and met the other person halfway and neither of you likes the fact that the child is becoming a watered-down version of neither of you? Or is the *idea* of a kid becoming enough to scare us?
Forget the love--where'd the faith go? Or how did I separate the two? I don't know. I'm looking...
I've been in some wonderful relationships--very loving, really amazing. But I'm wondering if in the future I need to maintain a larger sense of self, or if that will just make me unhappy. Do I need to find someone like me, or do I just need to find someone I enjoy being around? And what sort of balance does that require?
But you run into another issue and that is, quite simply, gender dynamics in modern society. They haven't come as far as people like to say they have. If I'm going to go out there and be an individualist in a relationship, I need to find someone else who can handle that and do the same, especially if I honestly am looking for an equal (which I would like to think I am). Or do I just need someone identical so by our powers combined we can be happy. I guess what I've found is that the middle ground makes me unhappy. And leaves me low on faith and low on love. Which is kinda sad, especially when you try to learn lessons from diplomacy. But the error seems to be in mistaking diplomacy with compromise. I guess I'm starting to learn that some things in our lives can't be compromised. And maybe some things in our lives can't be shared completely. Or maybe we're looking for a person who can't possibly exist.
I kinda regret not getting married at like 19 or 20 (theoretically). It seems like the generations before ours had a better idea of finding happiness in simplicity. Hey, we like each other, let's get married before we figure out stupid reasons not to like each other. That said, I'm not getting married anytime soon, I'm just saying enduring love seems to take the simplest form, rather than complex social structures and overthought belief systems which just seem to undo everything positive we try to figure out.
So that's me, on the eternal quest. As I'm sure many of you are. Godspeed.
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