I’ve been feeling like I’m treading water. After taking a bad spill a few months ago, my knee is pretty much healed, and I have back the use of my right hand—for driving and chopping veggies and signing my name. There is still strength needed in that hand, but is this really my focus?
A few days ago, a younger friend was telling me her plans for five years of advanced study, and the very thought of it left me shaking my head. What was the point? Would that five years of study actually teach her anything truly useful—knowing, for instance, how to leave life peacefully? Aren’t all the things we can learn just more complication, more “stuff” to hold in the mind?
I recall years ago being told that all of the skills we take on in life—swimming and skiing, of course, but also writing, computing data, and mastering languages… all of these are the “lessons of childhood.” There is one skill that is worthy of lifetime study—learning how to give and receive love.
I must admit that I still have a great deal to learn about giving and receiving love. I have, however, come a little way in this endeavor.
This morning, I had what could have been a difficult meeting with a long-term friend and editing client. I was going to tell him something about his almost-completed manuscript that I felt he wouldn’t want to hear. Last night lying in bed, I went over various approaches to the subject in my mind. Early in the process, I was so clever, so facile, so brilliant with my descriptions of why he should change his course in this area and what he ought to do.
Intermittently, I took refuge in my Guru mantra. Then I would begin again. It was two-thirty before I fell asleep.
When the two of us talked, I opened by asking him why he had handled this particular issue in this particular way.
He laughed. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think I know what you’re going to say, and I’m moving in the direction of agreeing with you.”
Almost immediately, he did agree—and, of course, it wasn’t because of any of the sparkling reasons I’d come up with the night before. Our exchange was easy, I think, because I reached out to him—because I wanted to hear what he had to say.
Sitting here on the other side of this—as it turned out—lovely meeting, I am so grateful. And this, I realize, is what I want to learn more about: how to live with more love.
Beautiful, Maha! Bahut acha. I have come to the same conclusion in recent months—that what is most important to me is being love, sharing love, and letting go of whatever is in the way of love.