stories

Mount Ras Dashen, Ethiopia, March 2007

Okay, this is a pretty public place to talk about this, but I like to work under the illusion that the people who want to read my blog are truly interested in who I am as a person, and that our human experiences shared, connect us to the whole in some mystical way.

Like many families, I suspect, mine is troubled. I won't go into all that. I've done that enough already. I don't want to tell a big old dramatic story or to blow my own horn here. However, I do want to share with you the happy place in which I find myself, the realization I had today regarding how far I've come.

It occurred today when somebody told me my ex-husband got married last year to the woman he's been living with ever since he and I split up. The person who told me, loves me and knows me well enough to understand some of the journey that I've been on all these years. And she knows me well enough to understand that I don't need to be "protected" from the truth.

Now, in this snapshot moment of where I am, you understand, I have no idea at all of the kind of person my ex husband has become. I only know what I was back then and I am happy with who I am now. The idea of any nostalgia for the past or what I was is so limiting that even holding a thought of it in my mind for the most brief moment imaginable, has me feeling stiffled and constrained. The idea that now, I would be upset or hurt by hearing my ex husband has married again merely has me smiling, amused. Those that kept that knowledge from me severely underestimate who I am, what I have gone through and the strength I now possess. And I realize they may be telling themselves a story of what happened that is totally different from what I think my story is.

To me that is amusing. Oh, to be sure, I'm still very idealistic and naive, ever hopeful about the people I meet, willing to see a best in them that even they themselves have given up on long ago. Ah well. Many people even think that I was too blind for my own good then and suggest that I should have sought revenge more effectively. I decided long ago however that that would be energy wasted and focused in the wrong place. And after all these years, I think even though unaware as I was, I am glad I made the decision to stop resisting what was happening and let it all go.

And best of all, I realize that all the things that troubled me, the struggles that have come and gone, most of them were and continue to be of my own making, as my mind and ego try to control, organize life to keep me safe and resist or avoid things that are unpleasant. I realize, that what is essentially me is not troubled by the sad and unhappy things that have happened to me or might yet happen to me. Just like the blue sky is not altered by the storms that pass through, what I am, essentially what is me, is not all those things, the story of what has happened to me. I am like the blue sky and gratefully, joyfully, I realize how wonderfully free I am!

Now, I feel like all of life is open to me, a great adventure and I have so many adventures to choose from, so much living to do!