Love always looks like love. It doesn’t dress in other fancy clothes or pretends it is something else. It always leads to light, ultimately to fewer complications, to greater expressions of art and goodwill and freedom and beautiful humor. It doesn’t manipulate or dominate or intimidate. It doesn’t have to. Love is open with its goals and agendas and dreams and visions. 

Love trusts. Love lets you in, doesn’t shut you out. Love speaks its mind but does so with care and kindness, even if the truth is tough to express. Love learns. Love does all it can to not repeat mistakes and repeat hurtful behaviors. 

Love shares. Love includes. Love reaches out. Love listens and responds. Love offers room for others to think and to feel. Love gives room for others to be free and to make mistakes. Love covers, love welcomes.

Love accepts others and forgives others but it also self-protects. Love is not afraid to say no. Love doesn’t go along with everything. Love is unafraid of declaring strong and healthy boundaries. Love has no elements of jealousy or possessiveness or a desire to seclude you from the others whom you love. Love always makes you free, free to explore, free to enjoy others especially within the confines and commitments of integrity and family.

Please, do not underestimate your power to spread goodwill and ensure for yourself, at least, a really good day. There are people who are committed to having a bad day no matter what so leave them to it. Get out of their way. Allow them all the room in the world for their negativity, but, for you, a good day is really possible.

Decide to serve others. Look for ways to ease the load others must carry and you will find yourself feeling remarkably free. 

Seek “downward mobility” and do the things you’ve somehow thought below your status, no matter how important you may think you are or have led others to believe how important you are. Your self-importance is an illusion. Get used to it.

Seek to listen to others and to hear others. I am sure you are aware that everyone is a walking and talking miracle no matter how much they may try to hide or deny it. Enter their miracle and you will be thrilled as will they.

Seek to learn from others and you will discover wisdom and humor and insight for your daily living in the most unusual and unexpected places.

Seek to be a source of mercy and in so doing you will become a person offering safety and healing.

Dear Rod,

Between a picture of a magnificent tiger & your column on Love in The Mercury this morning, I found myself weeping, as so much of what you said brought back memories of my beloved husband, who passed away 18 years ago.

He wrote me a letter a year before he died & I would like to share some of the things he said:

‘When I met you, I had no idea that any woman could have the capacity for love & loyalty that you have given me & I need you to know that I am so very grateful for the friendship, togetherness & happiness that I have shared with you through our marriage.’

‘Your capacity for calming me & comforting me during those times when I’ve been so scared of what has happened to me – heart attack – heart surgery & the cancer thing, especially when I know that you were probably more scared than I was, is nothing short of incredible. With a huge amount of love & loyalty & understanding and an ability to sort things out when I’ve messed them up, you have guided me through the last 24 years & made my life an absolute pleasure.’

‘We have also always been able to communicate any time, under any circumstances & on any subject & this has made such a great impression on me.’

‘I can only hope that the love I have given you is of comfort to you, God knows, I have given you very little else.’

If you wish to publish any of the above, please do so.

Gillian

“Dad, was I that small when I was a baby?” said Thulani gesturing toward a woman carrying a new-born baby. 

“Probably, maybe smaller.” 

“You were really brave, Dad.”

You were really brave, dad from my teenage son hit me hard, hit me beautifully over my heart and they remain among the most fabulous five words ever strung together and volleyed in my direction. You were really brave, dad from my son was jet-fuel, vitamins, caffeine, and glory, all entering my being, the moment the thought took to leave his beautiful brain and enter mine.

He saw it. He got it. He understood.

In that moment the boy became a man. Five words directed at me and I knew the boy had become a man. Here he was demonstrating the capacity to reflect upon his own life and measure something of its impact on those around him and affirm something he saw in me that was and is intricately connected to his well-being and to his life. Here he was at 14 or 15 expressing insights some are never afforded, an appreciation of the impact their lives have on others.

And I floated for a few days and felt seen and thanked and acknowledged and complete and I access the memory when I need a little encouragement.

Others have called me brave and complimented me on our family’s journey, but this was not the observation of a friend or a stranger. 

This was my son. He was seeing something about himself. He saw something about me. He saw something about family and courage and togetherness all in that moment a woman walked by carrying a new-born baby.

…….. and it all begins in your thinking and in telling yourself the truth about who you are:

You have the power

• To plan your own behavior in response to all that comes your way.
• To say “no” to requests and expectations that are uncomfortable for you.
• To say “yes” to opportunities and possibilities that broaden your horizons.
• To say give me some time to think this through whatever it is that needs more time and thought.
• To say “I have had enough” when you feel you are being tested or tried unnecessarily.
• To decide “I want a change” when you are exhausted and need time for rest.
• To decide, “I will be kind, I will learn from this, whatever it may be.”
• To choose to be someone who learns from all people and all experiences.
• To choose humility and mercy as your part of your gift to a hurting world.
• To choose to serve rather than to be served and will therefore never be short of work or opportunity.
• To bring light to others and to lighten the burdens of others as far as you are able.
• To do no harm to others and avoid errors of the past.

Fear of abandonment, rejection, and indifference strike something primal in the healthiest of men and women especially if they (abandonment, rejection, indifference) travel together and act as a destructive gang of sorts. 

“She closed the door on me after loving me,” and he talks incessantly about it happening without explanation. 

“One day we were really close, and the next day, nothing. It doesn’t seem to mean anything to her.”

“Different choices,” was all she said, in a text.

I sit with a man unaccustomed to sharing his heart. 

I know when I am hearing a broken one. 

He’s finding it very hard to understand how this woman can so easily be willing to be out of touch when they’d invested so much time and energy being in touch. It’s the small details of life together, life shared, that were so important to them both and are still important to him that she seems to have forgotten they ever enjoyed. 

He is mystified she can operate her life as if he no longer matters, no longer exists.

He’s feeling the loneliness he feared, beginning to accept he cannot sway, persuade or urge her to return to what once was.

“I’ve moved on,” she said to a friend.

He will emerge from this. 

A little kindness would make it all so much easier.

Listening to each other takes discipline, patience, focus and self-restraint.

It is an act of love and commitment and respect which requires deep awareness of nuance, tone and body language. It takes commitment to maintain eye contact, reflect on what is being said so neither person gets lost in the words or distracted by surroundings or seduced by “hijack thoughts” where totally unrelated matters capture one person’s imagination and they’re gone, even if they appear to be listening. 

Listening is a way of honoring and validating and an indication that the person talking and the person listening is thoroughly human and worthy of time and investment in every respect. To listen to each other’s is to hear the words and then to try to hear what is behind the words and what is inside the way the sentences are planned and packed and punctuated.

It is to enter into the world of another and get closer to his or her heart and nearer to the place we may all be truly seen, validated, and almost totally understood.

If we want to be good listeners it takes at least as much practice and anything else you may want to be good at like golf or the piano or tennis, writing, or art.

When you are under excessive stress of deadlines and unknowns and trying to pin down moving parts there are a few step you can take to slow the world down and to release or lower your levels of understandable anxiety: 

Always look for the big picture. Asking yourself questions and being brutally honest with your answers can help: How do I fit into what is going on? What is my role in this? How did I get myself here and what may it take to get myself unraveled or untangled from the quagmire I am facing?  

Always be determined to take a position of learning and humility. This means giving up the idea of having all the answers and of having to solve all the problems. If you were that good at solving all the problems and having all the answers you may not be in the position you are in. 

Be easy on yourself. You are not alone. The circumstances facing you need not define who you are now or in the future. While there is life and breath there is always hope. Share your issues carefully and cautiously with men and women who have experience in the matters you face and not with those who are likely to enjoy your dilemma for the mere intrigue.

It is easy to sit in judgment of men and women who do dumb and hurtful things within their families. It is easy to jump to trite and self-righteous explanations as to why he left her, or why she found another lover, why he resorts to pornography.

One or two line clichés seldom explain complex human behaviors and misbehaviors.

Everybody is living a complex story, a story born out of his or her own family complexities which often span several generations.

I do not know, after many years of consulting with families, a single family that I would consider free of family complexities, no matter how idyllic things look on the surface.

Conflicts and breakups and abandonments escape logical explanations because they come from confused and painful and illogical histories. This is not an attempt to excuse hurtful behaviors but rather an attempt to promote patience and understanding, mercy and love.

Dig deeper, always dig deeper. Listen closely, very closely. People are always leaving clues about the unsolved or unresolved issues of their family of origin.

Men and women don’t wake up one morning and make a decision to abandon a spouse and children. The person who does this has been living on a volcano for years and might not even know it.

There are fundamental truths about all relationships. Here are 5 of many;

• Patterns are set in place extremely early in all relationships. Don’t begin or initiate things that you’re unlikely to be able to continue.

• The person who wants the relationship the most is likely to become the most needy person in the relationship. If it’s not mutual and equal from the outset it will not gain those qualities over time. Are you sure you want to continue this way?

• Whoever works the hardest at the beginning of a relationship sets in motion an expectation for the other person (or people) in the relationship to not have to work as much. Are you sure you want this imbalance? It could go on for many years. 

• Things are unlikely to change or improve just because you hope they will. All healthy relationships take work from all parties. It’s “pie in the sky” to think things will get better if you get married, or build a new house, or have a few children. Things don’t improve without a plan and without the free and shared commitment of all concerned.

• People form relationships out of a some hidden historical backdrop no matter how honest or transparent a person may be. We all will all bring our unfinished business into our current relationships, no exceptions.