"A Rose is a rose is a rose"

You ever want something so bad and then realize that no matter how much you want something you can’t will it to happen. I suppose it has taken me a lifetime to comprehend that concept, but I am definitely starting to get it. I am a person who sets goals. I seek an outcome and then I set a goal to make that happen. I am rigid in my thinking, and I pursue the hell out of my goals until they are met. Lately, I don’t feel like the person that I describe. I feel less goal oriented and less structured in what I want. I want love and passion, the rest of it, is to live but what I strive for is far less structured than setting a goal and watching it happen. I want to feel the heat and the life force that is love. Perhaps I am getting soft in my old age, or it's that I finally understand the meaning of this one life I have been given. To seek passion and love in all things.

I love to work, I do. And as I transition out of two careers into one, I am appreciating my “free” time more and more. I like being able to sleep in a little extra, stay up a little later. The anxiety of the 4a alarm is getting less and I am starting to appreciate what having a little extra time in a day has to offer. The next few weeks will be a bit chaotic as I close this chapter of this 11-year book but I am excited to reach the finish line. It is a long time coming.

I woke up thinking about missed moments and opportunities. I find that there are many lately and while I am filling that time with “other” things, there is a part of me that is feeling tethered to another dimension. The one that remains hopeful and confident in love and not just any love but the specific love that I seek. I thought about love and the price we pay to love another human being and I thought, I have never loved anything so freely in my life before. There is no expectation, no demand, nothing other than me loving someone else for free. And as I write this I think, do I not love most other human beings in my life for “free” and if I really think about it, the answer to that is no. We have expectations of everyone in our lives. Our family, friends, our kids. We love them yes, but we have a certain expectation of how they should behave or act. I have learned over the last couple years that expecting from my loved ones as a condition to love them is never, ever, how I want to live. I lived that way my entire life. Being loved for the price of my choices, and my freedoms and after realizing how liberating “free” love can be, that is how I will choose to love all my people for as long as I live.

I was sad the other day, I saw that The Little Prince is going to be on Broadway this spring. And I immediately thought of her. How could I not? If ever a literary work described someone it would be her and The Little Prince. How incredible would it be to see her watch this tremendous story performed right in front of her eyes? I wonder if the performance would capture what her imagination has created. I will never know the answer to that but what I do know is that the image I have of her, and the innocence in her eyes and heart that not everyone gets to see, would allow her childlike mind and heart to show up and embrace every moment. It would be the most incredible site to see. She truly is a site to see.

I still see her. I suppose I never stopped. It was my anger and my frustrations that clouded my ability to show up in that knowing. I had so much anger in my heart and the moment I decided that anger was no longer suiting me, that it was preventing me from living, from moving forward, I was able to see everyone in my world differently. Always a lesson in life if you are willing to see it, nothing is ever wasted. It took me a long time to recognize that but now that I do, I am grateful for the opportunity to see life through a whole new set of eyes. Eyes, that seek beauty and growth above anything else.

I had a conversation with a client yesterday about the measure of success and how he sees success. His answer was that he wants enough money to have the freedom to explore the world. I thought, how beautiful that is. He doesn’t want money to buy things just to have the freedom to see all the beauty the world has to offer. And I thought, that sounds divine. It had me thinking that I seek that same freedom, but I seek it in the pretext of having love along side of me.

What I have learned about free love, the love we give without expecting anything in return is that it is as natural as breathing. We do it because it feels good not because it's going to yield a specific outcome. It is ours to wrap our arms around, to allow access to us whenever we need it. I don’t know that it hurts less than the tangible love we get from actually interacting with people we love but it is mine and I get to keep it. At times, I want so desperately to forget. To go numb to the way my heart feels. For what though? What purpose would it do to take love out of my heart and replace it with nothing? I have reached a place where loving her is better than letting go of the warmth that loving her brings me. I may never see her again, but I will always have the love that we shared. And even if it was for a fleeting moment, it was enough to thaw my heart for a lifetime.

Life has a very interesting way of humbling you, even bringing you to your knees when you least expect it. I have been knocked to my knees so often in the last two years and it took losing love to realize that I needed to stay down long enough to learn the lesson. I kept getting up to fight, to argue, to defend. I was not learning that I needed to be still and sit there on my knees long enough to learn. I learned a great deal these last couple months. Some lessons were life changing and some were heartbreaking but most of all it allowed me to find myself amidst all the chaos. I had lost sight of who I was as a woman, a mother, a clinician, a friend, a lover, and a partner. It feels so good to have found pathways to each of those selves. And while I still have a lot of work to do I know that I will continue to strive to be the best version of those selves that I can be. I lost sight of my passion for a long time. I will never give up on that side of myself again. The beauty about this self though, is that I don’t need anyone else to create that for me anymore. She helped me find my passion, she was the passion I was seeking, and I learned so much about love, life, and the pursuit of happiness alongside her. If ever our two roads meet again.....