Life
Lessons
“It is a
spiritual law that we can live one year thirty times, repeating our
greatest accomplishments and our worst failures. Or, if blessed to be
forced and shaped by life, we keep growing until we recognize where
we began as the seed of who we have become.”
Mark Nepo
(Weekly Reflection: The Purpose of Will, from Drinking From the River
of Light: The Life of Expression)
Have you ever noticed how
the same life-challenges repeat? This is especially true when it
comes to relationships. We choose our friends and lovers often for
unconscious reasons, and after two or three close relationships, we
begin to see a pattern emerge. There may be a particular type of
personality we're attracted to, or someone who acts in a familiar way
that we feel comfortable with. People sometimes choose someone like
their mother or father, or someone who's the exact opposite of their
mother or father. Sometimes, we rebound to a new person who is not
like the old one; who seems to have all the traits the last one
lacked. Most of that choosing is done unconsciously, and most of the
time it has its own array of difficulties. We see them in hindsight,
but rarely in foresight.
This is not unique to you
or to me. All of us do it unless we come from cultures in which
relationships are arranged for us—which, of course, have their own
pitfalls. We seem to pick and choose our friends and partners
according to what needs attention and healing at the time. We may
repeat this pattern our whole lives, with each successive
relationship addressing something in particular that is lacking. When
an important issue is involved, especially a spiritual one, the
universe will keep dealing us the same cards over and over until we
get a clue. Until we get the message, and become conscious of the
pattern, we are destined to repeat it.
This may sound like a
doom and gloom scenario, but it isn't. It is how life shapes us.
We're here to learn the lessons our soul requires to evolve toward
wholeness. Sometimes, we set out on a sea of unknowing very early in
life, determined to find “other-where.” We want to be anywhere
but where we are, and with anyone except the people we grew up with.
We may sail on that sea for a very long time, collecting life
experiences that we believe fill-in all the blanks, and give us all
the answers we could not get from the place and people of our
origins. What we usually discover is that the answers were there
within us all the time, but we had to allow life to reveal them. Life
will teach us, believe me, and not always gently. When we return home
it is with new eyes—conscious eyes—but an old heart; a new love
for the familiar, but for very different reasons. We come full circle
and find ourselves where we started, forced into wholeness by grace.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment