This passage was wonderful to read. Anne Morrow Lindbergh has such a powerful way of describing how to be in the moment with people, how to experience them as they are. The elasticity of relationships that she describes is something that really resonates with me. I want that for myself. I want to live that. And I feel lucky in my life that I can try and practice that way of connecting and relating to another person. I have a tremendous circle of friends (and friends with benefits) in my life.
I think about love and relationships a fair amount. I often assess whether a behavior or response that I see is something I want for myself. Whether it makes me feel comfortable and at ease or whether it makes me very wound up and emotional.
"When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand.
We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.
Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides."
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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