Life-long Learning

Today is my 39^th wedding anniversary!

We had lived together for four years before I pulled over to the side of the road on our way back from a vacation with my family and asked her to marry me. We were going to go to Japan where I was going to apprentice to a master potter. That never happened, but everything else did.

I feel incredibly blessed to have had such a long time together, though looking back I can’t imagine where all those years went. I remember bits and pieces—the night we moved into the apartment where our bedroom was a large closet just big enough to fit a thin futon and we said goodnight to each other against the background drone of the huge a/c system of the college dorm behind us. And the day we found out we were expecting a child and called our good friends though it was still way too early in the morning but we were so excited we couldn’t help ourselves.

The difficult times stand out as well. When we got the call that her mother was dying and we should come to Boston to be with her before she passed. And the year-long collapse of the independent high school where we both taught that led to leaving everything and moving to Worcester in 1991. Not to mention the myriad times of confusion and conflict between and within ourselves.

It turns out that living with another human being is a challenge and always a work in progress. Who knew? Though it all, I have found that I am quite a slow learner. I seem to have to learn the same lessons over and over. I am still trying to take in some of the things I need to learn about being a human being.

The wonderful (and terrible) thing about life, whether you are in a long-term relationship or not, is that it gives us all multiple opportunities to learn what we need to learn.

I suppose the most challenging lesson that I learn repeatedly is that it’s OK for people I love to have difficulties. My instinctual relationship to problems is to get out my hammer and try to fix them. Growing up as the son of a minister, I learned that my job was to notice when other people were unhappy and then to do something to help them to feel better. While this may be a noble aspiration and even occasionally helpful, it arises from a mistaken assumption about what is necessary and what is possible.

Of course our job is to be kind to each other and help as we can, but it is also true that other human beings have a whole range of feelings and that this is not a problem. Just because I feel uncomfortable that someone else is sad or confused or angry, doesn’t mean that it’s my job to get them to change. People don’t need me to fix them – especially my friends and family members.

So I’m slowly learning the lessons I need to learn. And this morning, I’m especially grateful to Melissa, my wife of these many decades, for her patience and support in the face of my ongoing stubbornness and slow progress toward true compassion and genuine relationship.

Personal Practice – What are the lessons that life is trying to teach you? Take a moment and think about the places where you repeatedly get stuck? What is the argument or confusion that arises again and again with you and your partner? With your parents or children or friends? With yourself? (Everyone/thing is a mirror that shows us some part of ourselves we have not yet known.)

What if this ongoing pattern of yours is not something to be fixed? What if this issue actually contains some learning of great importance for you? Lean into where you are stuck and see what you haven’t seen before. Don’t try to change anything.  Appreciate exactly where you are and see what happens.