Nothing Is Broken
My brother married his first wife when he was much too young. It was one of those situations where the rest of the family sensed the marriage was a bad idea from the get go but decided silently amongst ourselves to let John figure that out for himself. Predictably, it didn’t take long for things to start going sideways. A year or two in he shared some of the troubles with me in a long phone conversation. A week later it was his birthday and during my annual well-wishing call I asked how things were with his wife. “We had a couple drinks and hashed things out and everything is better now,” he explained.
Oh, how smug I felt knowing that everything was not in fact all better. But I should know. I have often felt the lure of that drug that is, “Now everything is all better.” I do not mean to insinuate that nothing ever gets better. Quite the opposite, as I wrote a few days ago. But the idea that I can fix my book, or my marriage, or myself assumes that things are broken to begin with.
No one is broken. Not one person on the planet. Ideas are broken – that is, they lead you away from where you naturally want to travel, which is always towards love – but people themselves are not broken. The only thing wrong with my brother’s relationship to his wife was that he shouldn’t have been married to her. Once they divorced, their relationship found its true form – polite, cordial, and in different cities.
And so on it goes. Stories aren’t broken, they just haven’t found their full form, or their true author. Sometimes stories come to us but we aren’t the ones meant to tell them, and so back they go into the communal story stew. I understand this is a trick of perception, but it’s a trick worth learning. Everything you do is an idea, a possibility, and all ideas are expendable. No matter how many ideas you try out and dispose, no matter how many roads lead to dry valleys, you remain intact as ever before, a perfect light seeking its fullest form.
If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.
