A wonderful article on the most important relationship: one with yourself. Click through for full article; you’ll be glad you did.
If you’ve been without a partner for a while and aren’t happy about it, it’s natural to wonder why. But put that question to yourself, and the result is you find yourself confronted with obstacles—some considerable. You’re single because you moved to New York, where the odds are tipped in favor of men, and not to Alaska, where they aren’t. Or because you take jobs that keep you at the office till the dead hours, or because you keep falling for married men, or because your husband died, or because you’re over a certain age, which, beginning at about 25, is generally ten years less than what you are right this minute. Then what do you do? You consider cashing in your career and moving to Anchorage, or signing up to be a mail-order bride to China—and then you weep.
I’m not saying that any of these obstacles are permanent or insurmountable. We all know stories of people who found flaming happiness exactly when everyone was convinced they wouldn’t. I recently heard—true story, I swear—of a woman in her 60s who was widowed unexpectedly and two years later married a Canadian mountie. Another woman, a landscape artist obsessed with her work, turned down man after man on the grounds that they were wrong for her, then, to her tsking friends’ astonishment, ran off with the right one. I was one of the friends who tsked, so I can testify firsthand. She’s radiant.
But what’s the point of finding happiness after years when you can find it right now? “Yeah, right,” you say. How? Easy. And hard: You change that question.“If you think happiness can lie in only one thing, she concludes, you miss all the available happiness.
When you expand yourself, you expand your world. And that’s why you do it, why you shift into a generous realm, not to get a boyfriend, though there’s a good chance that will be one result. (You’re a lot more attractive with a wide, full life than when you’re judging each man by what he can give you.) You do it for the broader vision, for the expansion itself, which will build on itself till your life will have levels and depths you never thought possible. You do it in order to be fully present at each moment of your life. When you are, anything can happen. When you’re shut down by fear, not much will. And you do it because when you’re in that larger place, you get to see, once and for all, there’s really nothing out there.”
Notes
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“If you think happiness can lie in only one thing, she concludes, you miss all...available...
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