Dear Ingrid Guerci:

What an interesting wording/ analogy: only trees cannot move. I like it, never read/ heard it before. I also like your simply presented advice: to learn from our mistakes so to not repeat. I hope to read from you again in this and/ or other threads.

anita

Dear Lisa:

So very good to read from you again, thank you for posting and for the kindness in your post!

Choosing Love is the title of your thread. I happened to stumble this morning upon a post you submitted about Love back on May 23, 2018, it has a poetic feel to it, as I read it today, and the content is profound:

“In my world it exists, in my dreams it exists, in my soul it exists, I believe it exists…but in the real world love does not exist. You can not see love in 2018. It doesn’t exist for the majority of people. Money exists, sex exists, status exists, Real Estate exists…  How many people would marry if they received no monetary or physical pay off from it? It’s like selling yourself isn’t it? A product on a shelf for people to pick and choose from.

“Marriage should be rare and with no demands. No demanded gift on Valentine’s Day… It’s not love to demand gifts, yet men do it because they get some kind of pay off. I don’t like business. I don’t like money, I don’t like meaningless exchanges, I don’t like aggressive, ill mannered people. I don’t belong in this world and yet I’m here”-

– your post back then brings  Corinthians 13:4-8 to my mind this morning, as it also talks about Love: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. <sup class=”versenum”> </sup>Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. <sup class=”versenum”> </sup>It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

Interestingly, the sentence right before the famous quote above (Cor. 13:3) reads: “If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”.

The title you chose for this thread back on Jan 15, 2019, Choosing Love, is more meaningful to me today (April 2024), as what the world as a whole needs to choose than it was in the relatively peaceful times of the pre-pandemic, pre-Ukraine war, pre-escalated Middle East wars of Jan 2019.

anita

Dear SadSoul:

Thank you, SadSoul!

“My younger self stepped in a bit just now to say, ‘No! We’re not born with mud on us! Every one is born perfect! And beautiful. Lovely and deserving“-

– We are born perfect, beautiful, loving and deserving! Unfortunately, we are born perfectly loving and deserving into a muddy world, a world where, as Clint Eastwood said in his movie Unforgiven, “deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it“.

(In the scene he was pointing a rifle at the sheriff, about to shoot, and the sheriff pleaded: I do not deserve this!)

“We owe it to our loved ones to do our best to be love to them though, no matter how crappy.. life we got“- yes, we do!

“I’m not arguing your point just totally contradicting it“- my point was not that we were born corrupt. But that we are born into a corrupt world, and we end up- eventually- with some corruption in us, and passing it on. At least at times, to one extent or another. And it is every person’s personal responsibility to identify those corruptions/ mud and remove it from our words, expressions and behaviors. I am still working on it.

Do you disagree with my point above?

“I miss the young me that thought everything was beautiful even though it was not. It protected me from lots of hurt. Old me doesn’t want mud to be all there is“- good thing, mud/ corruption is not all there is!

“I did an amazing thing today, it took some skill and amazing amounts of courage, strength, perseverance, and patience. I’m in pain now.. I’m not all that strong or fit. But I did it and it wasn’t a failure!“- Congratulations! (I wonder if you are referring to an extreme sport, such as sky diving or climbing steep and slippery rocks, lol. I know you don’t want to share about it, and that’s okay).

“I quit smoking a very long time ago. Ha. 15 a day. I was more like 50“- this is a huge achievement, again, congrats!

anita

Dear SadSoul,:

Congratulations for quitting smoking. Which reminds me about loneliness: “Widespread loneliness in the U.S. poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily.. the U.S. surgeon general said Tuesday in declaring the latest public health epidemic” (pbs. org, May 2023)

“Isn’t the world a smaller place when we can be friends across oceans?  Back in the olden days, when I was a child and an adult, we wrote letters…“- the good old days… the bad old days.

“Whether it be with God, or whatever comes at the end, I believe we all have a reckoning. I don’t look forward to mine; mainly because I am so worried about my pride getting in the way of my accepting my failings… Occasionally I wonder if having children was a mistake. If I’ve passed on the cycle of abuse somehow“- we all pass on the abuse. We are born into it, and we pass it on. Some more than others. It takes awareness, decency, and healing in the inside to not pass it on anymore. It’s like.. we’re all born into a collective muddy water pool, so we get mud on us, and before we know it, we rub bodies with others (or give birth to others) and pass on the mud.

It is each person’s responsibility to remove one’s personal mud as soon as possible and no longer pass it on. Not easy, being that we live in a muddy world. Yet necessary.

There is no day of reckoning, aka judgment day sometime in the future. It’s happening every day as we judge ourselves and each other. I can live with myself with much more peace of mind than before because (1) I am doing all that I can to clear the mud off of me whenever I notice it, and I notice, (2) I don’t take personal responsibility for the mud I was born into.

“I wonder if you have a dog who walks with you“- Boe walked with me twice, uninvited (and not on a leash). Once, he got into a neighbor’s yard where there’s a bigger dog that can be vicious, I was scared for Boe big time. Another time, he joined me on my other route, toward the highway, and had a neighbor collect him into their car before reaching the highway.

* I read your post in my thread, but I am not sure if it’s okay to comment on it (it’s against .. my rules on that thread)…?

anita

Dear SadSoul:

You submitted your post exactly 3 minutes after I submitted one in my own thread.

Please, no need to say Sorry to me! Your feelings are as important as mine. I want to hear/ read about yours no less than I want to tell you about mine.

“I knew that was a little boy talking, but it made him all the more precious… the loss of him as I knew him“- often I analyze people, analyze stories, but there is nothing to analyze when it comes to 100% pure pain, a loss such as this.

Oceans apart, here I am, there you are, but we are close, so I feel, close to you.

anita

Dear Kshitij:

You are welcome! I am thinking that your father projected his father (with whom he was very angry for many years) into you- not because you deserved his anger (not at all!), and not because your behaviors (and maybe even your looks) were more like his father than your siblings’, but because you were first-born. He has been holding his anger inside him probably since he was a child. When you were born- his first child– it was his first opportunity to express his long-held anger, to let it out, at a child that belonged to him (an easy target).

This is what abuse is about. my mother did the same to me, as I was too first born.

“One reason he acts differently towards my younger brother is because he probably sees himself in his personality, he finds a similarity“- excellent insight. For one, he didn’t project his father into them (this was your  “job”, unfortunately for you). If he expressed affection for them over the years, it means that yes, he probably projected himself into them.

“Now, when I live abroad away from home, he tries to get close to me and acts very cordially; but the more he tries the more I get repelled“- I too felt repelled by my mother over the years, because she did to me, in principle, what your father did to you.

“Since childhood I would use to ruminate over incidents of his unkind treatment and that happens even now when I think about a past situation or hypothesize about a future confrontation. It leads me to rage fits at times… back when I was a kid/teenager, there used to be times when I would be filled with rage, despair and frustration and I would cry myself to sleep“-I ruminated too, I was anxious too about the next time she’d rage at me, so I would ruminate about what I might have said or done wrong to bring about her next rage.

And I felt rage myself, rage at her, which I held inside.

I’ll answer your questions in the last paragraph, best I can, tomorrow morning (in about  14 hours from now).

anita

Dear Tommy:

“…The neighbors said, how terrible the new horse caused your son to break his leg…. The next day, the government came by to conscript all the men in the village. When they saw the farmer’s son, they left him cause he had a broken leg. The neighbors said, how lucky your son has a broken leg. So, what is the truth? Does the truth change from one moment to the next depending upon the present conditions?“- I’d say: no, the truth does not change: (1) Riding/ training/ handling horses can be dangerous and if one chooses to be around horses, one should be attentive, skillful and careful, (2) It is safer for a person to stay home with a broken leg than to go to war with two intact legs.

“So, thank you for your help and well wishes. I will check my anger the next time I speak.”-.you are welcome, Tommy, and thank you for checking your anger the next time you speak (I will do he same)!

anita