relationships | Tracks In The Dust

Archive for the tag “relationships”

09 Jun 2013

The Meaning of Love

Before I was in love with my wife, I had an idea of what love was. A deep feeling of passion and remembrance. A way to feel that was part of songs and poetry.

Time had captured a high-school romantic way to know about desperate love and the pain when it was over. Everyone has a different definition, but the verb “to love” I have learned has a meaning depending on where you started and how you got there.

After I fell in love with my wife, I realized how easy it was to be fooled into believing you were “in love.” It is so much more once you know that love means more. It’s really unfair, because until you know that kind of love- you can’t understand it.

And once you do know that love, you cannot explain it to anyone quite exactly the way it is. But people will tell you they know, that they are aware of it. Perhaps they do- but only you and her will know for sure.

And then they we to capture it by making a “day” out of it. On this day my wife and I celebrate an “anniversary”- another milestone in which to track the movement of life. It has been decades of love with my wife. We have experienced pain, elation of children in our lives, the passing of parents and the loss of one of our children to something we could not for-see. We have moved to many cities, experienced many lessons over time. We are here to tell each other it will all be fine– we are together in God’s love. We understand much about love. Not everything mind you, but much of love and the life we have led together.

Posted in Learning Lessons Along the Journey Of Life and tagged cherish, choices, God's love, life is precious, Love, Marriage, moments, Online Writing, relationships, Romance

03 Jun 2013

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Changing Lives One Day At A Time

Time seems to stand still once in a while. There is nothing special happening, nothing monumental. Yet all around you are people who are experiencing quite the opposite. They may be having a life event, a special moment perhaps. They may have run into the depths of failure, or the heights of success.

But there you are. Living in one of those nondescript days where at the end of it, you have to ask yourself how it got so late at night and it is “time for bed”. It seems like a throw-away day. Just moving through the day like the sun overhead. Moving from east to west and finally being done warming the day.

Sometimes it makes me feel sad. It’s a day you can never get back, no chance to have a “re-do”. Could there have been opportunities to make a difference in someone else’s life, to strike a conversation, help someone you may not even have known by offering an act of kindness? Could you have spent a moment to call a friend, make someone laugh or just tell someone you haven’t seen in a while that you were thinking of them?

All of those things seem so simple and somewhat insignificant I guess. But they are not, are they? They are reasons for the chance to live the day. To provide forgiveness, to show kindness, to create a new timeline of events for someone else perhaps, a possible very small thing for you- that sends someone off in an entirely new direction in their lives.

Then you can still say it “seemed like an uneventful day”. But not… it seems for everyone. I will work to make that day happen. How about you?

Posted in Doing Things That Will Change Your Life and tagged being remembered, Boring days, Changing Lives, choices, Compassion, Forgiveness, Grace, Kindness, Making A Difference, Reality Check, relationships, Sprituality

31 Jul 2012

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Control of Your State Of Mind

Who has control of your state of mind? Doesn’t it really come down to you?

If we have anything to learn in our lives around how we live it, one that thing that truly seems to escape some people is “how one looks at their life and all that surrounds it.” There seems to be so many sad or angry people who are stuck in one place- looking through a single vision. Some people walk through life sharing their state of mind with anyone who crosses their path. “Would you like to get angry with me?” they seem to say. Or “I am sad- can I share my sadness with you-” wishing that perhaps you can be sad too. In fact if you share their mood they may even start to feel better about themselves.

But then don’t we all have control over our own view of the world around us? It is OUR view after all. Sure. We can choose to be the victim of the circumstances that have brought us to this particular point in time. We can ignore the opportunity to make things better, expelling the chance to change things perhaps because of the uncomfortable feeling that can come with change. Even in our deepest state of “blues” we relish the feeling, even as we lament about escaping it. No doubt it is great to experience to help put things in perspective.

Others may go searching for the more positive path ahead. But that can take time. I have met friends and family who say that “life is a journey” but they choose to travel that journey with little direction. They wander along “looking for themselves” – Change for change sake…can result chasing after something they may never find. “Finding themselves” can create a reason to not go forward, rather than working harder to “create yourself”. Searching can mean waiting for someone else to define who you are, it can create boundaries.

So what do I tell my kids? Regardless of today, the next direction is based on your a state-of-mind I think. It starts there. Don’t let the anger and sadness consume you, don’t let it send you to places that can smother the reasons to change. Your state of mind is yours to choose. Okay, so we all need to have the downs to better appreciate the up’s; but we cannot wallow in it. Take some time to have the blues/ but then take the time to change your direction and create that journey with a positive direction. Choose to deal with it and move forward.

“Happiness is not the absence of problems, it’s the ability to deal with them.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

Posted in Doing Things That Will Change Your Life and tagged Acceptance, Anger, choices, Emotion, Happiness, Postive Thinking, Reality Check, relationships, Sadness, Self-Awareness, Self-Help, Sprituality

23 Jul 2012

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The Foundation of Lies

It is said that “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Whether Mark Twain said it or some preacher in a sermon long,long ago… it seems to be more true that ever before. Today’s world-wide web can help make even the ugliest lies seem like truth. People read them and then pass them on to tens of thousands of others because they want to believe in their version of the truth, however unreal it may be. If it fits the perception of what someone thinks it should be, then it goes on and out to more. If something t was said by someone you believe also thinks like you, “it must be the truth“. Right?

So we maybe people are building “their” reality on lies. For others they could be building their friendships on half-truths or fabrications, which sadly pass on things like hate and prejudice. Very often I have seen relationships between couples of many years that have gone into a spin because of simple things that have blossomed into lies and flared up into full-fledged fires. All because of one person’s version of the truth that gets created to fulfill personal need.

Lies can hurt, lies can also motivate others to do things that are right or wrong. Sometimes lies are justified, maybe bolster our own confidence to do things that are seemed to protect others from hurt. But we cannot let them control our sense of right and wrong. We need to make sure that we understand that our truths are what needs to guide us in our love and our life. We have to clear the way to not listen for what we think we need to hear, but we listen to our hearts and heads without the noise. Be mindful that we can be motivated to even lie to ourselves. And those lies can perpetuate in the worse way to effect our future.

Posted in Doing Things That Will Change Your Life, Learning Lessons Along the Journey Of Life and tagged Change, hearts and heads, Lies, life is precious, Love, Postive Thinking, relationships, Truth

28 Jun 2012

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Choosing Reconciliation

There are times in your life when there will be conflict, with your family, lover or friends. There will just be things you will never agree on, because that is the way all humans are designed. It is good to be different. So what then? Perhaps you can focus on reconciliation rather than resolution. I have noticed over the years with many of my friends that couldn’t find a way to grasp this in their relationships, that they lost too much in the process. They expended so much energy in their lives that they would never recover.

Reconciliation drives toward re-establishing relationships. Resolution on the other hand, targets the thought that you have to resolve every issue by coming to a conclusive agreement on everything. I think deep inside most of us know that it can’t happen that way. Whether you both love each other, are the “best of friends” or are highly spiritually centered, whether you have made a promise to never disagree or are determined to “be yourself” at all costs; there are going to be some things you’ll never agree on.

But you can disagree without becoming disagreeable — that’s what God calls wisdom. “It’s wise to compromise. You can have unity without uniformity. You can walk hand-in-hand without seeing eye-to-eye. You can have reconciliation without resolution of every issue.”

It continues to be such a trend today to focus on “being yourself” by being declared unique, and while that itself is important, we seem to take that to an extreme. We risk declaring ourselves so special, so privileged in our sovereign definition of “me” that we forget the fundamental things that brought us together in as friends, or as a “couple” or as what the core of our family. Many of the people around me seem to sacrifice their relationships in order to stand upon their “individualism” and then later wonder why they are alone, why they are forever struggling with the interaction of the world around them.

So we have to appreciate the differences, but then focus on the relationship. I have noticed that often looking back the issues that were creating the rifts in my relationships, they have become insignificant in the scheme of things. In our world full of broken relationships, we would be so much better off if we could commit to striving toward reconciliation.

Making the effort is more than half the battle, winning is not the ultimate reward here. (Sorry for all you self achievers on that point). People often still ask me how I can be married for as long as I have. The words love and honor in the traditional wedding vows are followed by obey, but the thing to obey is our focus on the relationship, the reconciliation and the rewards of what that brings to love. That is one of the things my wife and I are working on every day, and I hope that everyone can keep doing what we can to “make it work”.