Laundry List Item 14: You can't make anyone love you.

Sheldon Kopp's laundry list of items provides with ideas for blog posts for those days when I am not sure what to write about. The next item I am up to on his list is one that I have painfully learnt.

No matter what you do or say, it is so true and frustrating that you can't make anybody love you. Therefore there is no point in even trying.

As one of my podcast interviewees (to be release in the next few weeks!) said, the thing to focus on is self love, because you can learn to love yourself. And it is in loving yourself, in understanding what you need, and having the courage to give it to yourself, that we attract people along the way who will love us for who we are, and whom we can wholeheartedly love in return.

Wanting to run, but managing to stay

There comes a moment at an event or gathering with a group of people whom I do not know that well where I want to leave. I start to feel some social fatigue, I feel like I am starting to be boring and have nothing to say, and I want to run and get out of there as fast as I can. 

Yesterday and last night I had a number of those moments. I am participating at Purpose conference with a bunch of people who are my tribe, and whom I am still getting to know. After spending the day with them, and eating with them, I began to get that quickening that I wanted out, and I wanted out now. 

Somehow I managed to sit in that feeling instead of running from it, and what unfolded was pretty amazing. I met my brother from another mother in Sydney, a man who could also be the grown up version of my son, and potentially somebody I could work with this year. Sitting in the social unrest for a short period of time led to an fantastic social moment.  

I don't think that every time I get the sense I want to leave that I need to stay. Sometimes my being needs rest, and sometimes the place is not right for me. I am starting to pick up on my own subtleties and nuanced feelings about when it is time to leave, and when it is time to lean in.  

Laundry List, Item 7: You can't have anything unless you let go of it.

The lyrics from U2's Dirty Day frequently sing through my thoughts at the moment:

You can hold onto something so tight, you've already lost it

This was the case for me with my marriage after the rough period started. Probably the only chance I had in enabling it to survive was to let go of it, radically and absolutely, as soon as the warning signs were there. Instead I fought, I begged, I clung, I debated. Eventually, after 3 months of grasping and 10 days of silence, I was able to come to terms with letting go.

By then it was too late for the marriage, but it was just in time for the rest of my life. I had a profound understanding that nothing lasts. That thinking that I can hold onto anything, onto something, is completely misguided. An illusion and a fallacy. 

Letting go of something does not guarantee that you will have it. However it is the only way to truly have anything. Because the things you end up having will be there because they choose to be there, and because there is an honest and integrity to them being there with you. 

I have less now, much less, than I did 12 months ago. I am in a partnership of 1. I earn less. My house has less things in it. I don't have a plan for the next 12 months. It seems in letting go of these things, I now have life. I can't remember ever being this happy.

"...work out your own salvation..."

The more days that pass, the more Sheldop Kopp's words ring true. I think I will write a post on each item in his Eschatological Laundry List

Another quote from his book:

Love is more than simply being open to experiencing the anguish of another person's suffering. It is the willingness to live with the helpless knowing that we can do nothing to save the other from his (their) pain.

We cannot work out the salvation of anybody else. We cannot take their pain away for them, force them to process things in a particular way because they seem so clear to us. Each person needs to own their own journey, and work it out as best they know how.

Choosing to work out my own salvation, and freeing others to do the same seems scary, uncertain, and probably liberating in the long run. Sometimes I just want to know that outcome, but in the end knowing the outcome would breed apathy.