Something shifted in my environment two days ago. Not in my physical environment, but in the realm of my spirit. A fresh resolve was birthed in me. I began to awaken to the things I used to tell myself were non negotiable in a relationship with someone.
As you grow in this world, you learn to adapt to a certain kind of disappointment when you realize that nothing is really black and white. There are rarely two clear cut options or paths to take. It's not really about a kettle or a pot, or whether a man is handsome or rich. It's the totality of all the features and behaviour that you're willing to accept and those you're willing to overlook in order to love wholly.
For me, I've come to realize that big on my list now is ensuring that the rest of my life is spent in communion with uniformity and the life force that births it. I need a single source of truth to guide me from a creator I believe in and I need whoever I will be doing life with to be on the same page about this.
Recently, I've had to relearn that human efforts and love are grossly insufficient. There's so much to prune in us, there is so much messiness to cause us to hurt other people willingly, callously, even as we profess with hands raised to strike, that we love them dearly. The irony is that we cannot see the caricature we make of ourselves in action, and it is observers and recipients of our cognitive dissonance who have to point it out to us.
I cannot live without kindness and forgiveness. I cannot be in fellowship with a person who does not believe in forgiveness and in the principle of turning the other cheek. It sounds idealistic. It is idealistic. It is strange and I don't claim to have achieved such idealism. Yet, I am a firm believer in iron sharpens iron, so I know that even if I fail, what matters is that I fail not with intention, but that I fail while trying to achieve this ideal. I also would really love to know that I have a partner who is equally striving to achieve this and is actively helping me out when I fall.
There's nothing as beautiful as love. It has become important for me to know what someone means when they say they love me. What I mean when I say or think it. Love can feel like wrath to a child when it comes in the form of correction or an unexpected yell if a parent found them trying to put their hand out into the fire. Yet, it is love. Love is not money. It is not lust. It is not possession. It is freedom to pursue more love. It is a thing that covers so much wrong. It is a thing that aims to take you from the mundane and passing heaven and earth. It transcends. Love is non negotiable for me.