A lifelong philosopher and committed dreamer, I reflect on my passions – my commitment to Love. I am inviting conversation, contemplation, I will not tell you how to feel or to live. What you should or shouldn’t do is completely up to you. I will do my best not to ‘should’ on you.
Regularly I ask myself, “What fundamental outcome are you committed to?”I follow that with, “Are you prepared to pay attention, to live consciously, to abandon what has not served, take up what speaks to the future you are committed to creating? Are you prepared to do this in each and every moment?”
I am committed to Love, if I want love and respect in the world it is very simple: Love and respect others. I love that sentence, Love and respect others. Just period.No “if they do this, if they do that.” If you show up the way I want, need and expect you to then I will love you with all my heart … if not well, go away. This is so not okay.How will we possibly have world peace if there is not acceptance and understanding in the world of our immediate creation?World peace becomes like a story with a Holy Grail. Something that is held by many as a fairy tale, sought after by a few but never experienced as truth by the whole.
I am going to capitalize World Peace. I like to capitalize words I value and words that hold the energy of higher ideals. I know about the ‘shoulds and suppose tos’ in spelling and grammar and such, I am just not sure they always apply in the creative process.Although my sister may disagree because she is committed to preserving the English language as she knows it. Hmmm there is another reflection we must explore, wanting to keep things as they are. You would also love to meet my sister; she is fabulous. I digress.
Back to Love and Respect and ultimately World Peace. So I want love and respect in my life, so love and respect others period. Do not stop at the “yes but you did me wrong.” There is pride all woven in that attitude.I have to ask myself, am I more committed to my pride than to love? So that pride trumps the choice we have in each moment to choose Love? Hmmm. Whatever I need to do, I need to find a way to love and respect those around me.
If I am tempted to choose pride, I need to recognize my fear, what motivates me, what cripples me as a warrior committed to Love considering not choosing it in that moment.What cuts me off? I need to offer the very existence of these things as way of deepening my understanding of those in the world around me.Understanding that others are acting out of their fear, their motivations, their wounds. We are really not that different from each other. Then get off it. Get onto what creates the outcome we are committed to. Committed to World Peace? Well then, what about the one who did you wrong?Are you generating peace or holding on to your pride and self-righteousness?
People will do what they will do. How many of us have really been taught how to Love? If I keep expecting everyone to know how to Love perfectly I am going to be perpetually disappointed.I have spent the last two decades very intentionally studying about the active power of practicing Love, the how, the why, the when and still I have a great deal to learn. It probably comes more naturally to others and of course we all have varying ideas about how it should look, and there is that word again, ‘should.’Not sure what place that word has in my vocabulary. The opportunity to practice choosing Love presents itself in every moment if my eyes are open but I am saying that we are not all real good at it yet. Jesus was really good at it.Buddha was really good at it.When I am that good at it I will know I have accomplished something.
For now I practice.People do what they do; I listen very carefully, often trying to hear many layers down. I consider the truth of what they say and do and feel from their perspective. I think about how I am feeling or reacting (and you can bet that sometimes I have reacted before I can hear another word they say! Slow down Shey.) I share with them how I feel if they are open to that. I reflect on what I can come to understand about them, about myself. I am usually prepared to agree to disagree, I have found this incredibly useful.I ask myself, can I accept any loss and still Love? Can I allow myself to grieve a loss and embrace compassion?What of the mother that forgives her son’s killer? How to understand that? What of making peace with death, the end of this life or the death of a moment, an idea, a dream?Can I, will I, choose Love in each moment? It truly is our natural state.