Boston

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Love Comes Out of Bad Because in Any Circumstance, Good or Bad, Love Comes

Victor Hugo-Bridge

Image via Wikipedia

Ten years ago, what were you doing in life.  Did you think you would be “here?”  Were you thinking past September 11?

My daughter asked me the other day what I meant when I said that good can come out of bad.  You know me.  I cocked my guns and started happily blazing.  Good coming out of bad has nothing to do with the badness of events.  It has everything to do with the goodness.  It has everything to do with what is stronger.  The love.  Love is stronger than anything.

Victor Hugo described La Esmerelda‘s beauty with this kind of quality around her peers.

As, however, they all possessed nearly the same degree of beauty, 

they fought with equal weapons, and each might cherish a hope of 

victory. The coming of the Bohemian suddenly destroyed this

equilibrium. Her beauty was so surpassing, that at the moment 

when she appeared at the entrance of the room, she seemed to shed 

over it a sort of light peculiar to herself. In this close 

apartment, over-shadowed by hangings and carvings, she appeared 

incomparably more beautiful and radiant than in the public place 

like a torch which is carried out of the broad day-light into 

the dark. In spite of themselves, the young ladies were dazzled. 

Each felt wounded, as it were, in her beauty.

Love, or call it goodness, has a victory to offer us.  In the presence of bad or not bad, Love is.  And because it is, the turning of bad into good happens.  In consequence to its goodness and nothing else.

...like a torch which is carried out of the broad 
day-light into the dark.

September 11, ten years ago, the streets of Boston were filled with parked cars.  The taxis were not going anywhere.  Their drivers were dazed, their radios blasting the news of smoke and buried bodies.  I was weeping with them and sat on the curb, cold with the early night, listening to their radios.  I don’t know why I didn’t go home to watch the news.  I wanted to be with these people I think.  The people.  We needed each other.  What could love bring out of this ten years later?  What would light do in this darkness?

I don’t know what your story is but I believe that Love is.  And because of what it is, in our darkness, good can come.  It has everything to do with what Love is and is all the more lovely because of the bad company.

Here is one mother’s story.  Please tell us yours.  Keep on.

Self-Care Tip – When bad is there, remember that Love is.

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Waiting For Self-Care to Start

Self-Care Tip #176 – Don’t wait to start caring for your self.  

I’ll get to it when things slow down for me.

I can’t handle one more stress on top of the kids and all the people who take, take, take.

Don’t take this away!  It’s my only vice!

I don’t have time because I’m working so much.

There are so many good reasons to wait for self-care.  I don’t belittle them.  I do them too.  There’s a reason we here at FriendtoYourself.com call self-care the hardest work.  It is not for anyone who isn’t willing to go through the fire of putting themselves first.

“The fire,” you say?  Yes.  Fred taught me that.  He was down twenty pounds, working out almost every day with aerobic and anaerobic exercises, putting his ear-plugs in when sounds escalated his nerves, more motivated, interested and active.  Fred was growing again.  He said that it had been years since he’d done any of these things for himself and couldn’t believe what the world looked like when he felt so good.

Fred was sad though.  Not depressed.  No, he hadn’t been depressed for at least a year on his medication and even less so since he was taking care of himself physically.  But sad.  His wife wasn’t interested in his changes, she was disconnected emotionally, and more so every day it seemed to him as he began to change physically, emotionally and behaviorally.  His friends were growing distant.  He wasn’t interested in office politics either.  It was a simultaneous coming together of life in himself and a falling away of the life connection in his “previous life,” as he called it.  Surprisingly, the people he loved the most weren’t so happy for him.  Weren’t supportive of him.  He was sad for that.  There are never gains without losses.

This is not to forget the new relationships he was growing.  There was new life all around him and he still maintained hope for the connections he had before.  But those people who he had called his own for years were the ones who gave him all the reasons to wait for self-care.  He was way past waiting.  He was already on the other side enjoying the sun.

Question:  What have you overcome to get at your own self-care?  Is there anything your are still waiting to do?  Please tell me your story.

*Art work (assumed) courtesy of carldagostino.wordpress.com.

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