Love’s Open Water
A familiar phrase floats through the air, like an old song’s chorus piped into a store’s background music: This isn’t what I signed up for. That chorus is comfortable in its discomfort. It’s an old friend because of familiarity, not because it’s a favorite. I can sing along to it as well as anyone, and maybe it too changes our purchasing habits. What do we buy into with our beliefs, if we reject the unexpected? What do we miss by turning away from all that’s beyond what we desire life to be?
Little has ever been what I’ve signed up for, in the course of the wild zigzag life I’ve lived. Expectations have constantly been shattered, in career and love and family, in society and climate, even within the ethereal realms of my own soul. Disappointment is as familiar as joy. Yet I’ve learned that embracing disappointment is the key to transcending it.
When I first chose a creative life rather than a safe and predictable one, I didn’t know it was a false choice. There is no such thing as a safe and predictable life, even along the straightest nine-to-five path, never venturing far from home. You’ll never know what will greet you next, even within your own skin. Cancer taught me that, young. Emotions did too.
As soon as I stopped chasing specific goals—which healing cancer also taught me—everything shifted. Instead, I learned to invite qualities of life rather than demanding that they manifest in rigid, preconceived forms. I signed up for mystery and adventure; for journeys rather than destinations. Suddenly every day was what I signed up for, and more.
Mystery and adventure aren’t always pleasing. Yet some of their most harsh manifestations can lead us beyond them, via finding our purpose through pain. That can lead to the best surprises of our lives. It’s wild and humbling.
As with many before me, I’ve learned the joy of service in the alchemy of that humility; found adventure and mystery in serving a higher cause, often rooted in transforming pain. No longer seeking personal achievement has been my most satisfying achievement, despite how imperfectly I’ve achieved that too. Simply letting go brings great reward.
Higher causes can also be simple. To let go of my career to care for my dying mother brought me new life, as well as easing hers. By becoming a caregiver, I became a care receiver in ways I never envisioned. It brought me skills that now translate into easing the suffering of others, including my own. Within the grueling tasks caregiving often demands, I frequently found that phrase again: This isn’t what I signed up for. Yet it was, because what I signed up for was to love the one who so beautifully loved me, from the moment she birthed me.
The painful adventure of a loved one’s passing opens a path into the infinite wonder of the cycles of life and spirit, which endlessly stretch within and beyond us. It’s an opening to ancient and timeless love, which then can inform new love with compassion and wisdom. Within my intense grieving after my mother’s passing, my universal love deepened.
Lately that universal love has deepened my connection with my beloved partner. In the fourteen years since she and I met, our paths have diverged in turbulent waters, only to wildly converge again. In the years we were apart, she too navigated a wild river of caregiving, with its unimaginable, painful demands.
Yet our reward for caring service is that our journeys have brought us back together in a blessed phase of peace. At the moment, we’re in kayaks on calm open water. We’ve reached a moment of shared beauty, where water’s liquid vivid reflections and our togetherness fill us to overflowing with wonder and gratitude. Now the painful past suddenly makes sense, as a pathway to a beautiful present. It’s a simple miracle, just to be alive together in quiet celebration. This isn’t what we signed up for. No, it isn’t. It’s much more beautiful than that.
In all of love’s forms, its open waters aren’t always calm. Winds pick up, storms arrive, far larger than we are. Yet it’s often within the turbulent currents, not the calm, in which love deepens most. Sometimes the greatest adventure and mystery is how love can purify under pressure, when we open to it in service beyond seeking.
Whatever turbulence may yet arrive for all of us, our embrace of disappointment remains key in transcending it. When we sign up for the adventure of our own growth and healing, even our disappointment can become more beautiful than we can conceive, if we surrender to the wonder, the mystery, the letting go into love’s open water.