A Bridge of Love or A Bridge of Hate?

I know we all have moments where something will irritate us that a loved one does…be it snoring, clanking their coffee spoon, leaving the bathroom messed up or clothes on the floor. I remember when I was first divorced and my boys were five and eight and they went for the first time to spent a month with their Dad during the summer. Oh my …the house was so empty. I kept thinking I heard them calling me and would get up to go look. The house stayed so clean and yet I missed seeing their toys scattered about, missed the pile of laundry by the washer to be washed, missed even seeing their bath toys in the bathroom.

I read about so many families that argue and fuss all the time and wish their kids were grown and gone or that their loved one were not around and I think….yes and after a bit…you will miss even the annoying things they do..especially if the absence is permanent. I was watching an old Reba episode and the married teens were fighting and the youngest child..the boy said “remember what grandma told us?”  They asked him what he was talking about and he said “grandma said after grandpa died that she even missed his snoring that she used to complain about and could never hear it again.”

I think sometimes we get so caught up in the trivial things that we lose sight of what is important…which is that we have each other …we have our loved ones and instead of focusing on the negative, we should focus on the positive about them. Just like we would want them to focus on the positive things about us. Life can change on a dime and what we have can be gone and if we do not make the most of each minute, we have lost those minutes forever.

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image from http://jerrydross.com/the-power-of-focus

It goes back to that “choice” thing that some people hate me to say. Life is all about choices and our choices lead to consequences and we have to be prepared to accept what our choices bring. When we get mad or irritated at someone we love and do not go around them and talk to them…the consequence is lost minutes, hours or days that we can never get back and during that “not talking to them” time….we could lose them forever.

I have always believed that we should never ever let the sun set on our anger. If you are mad at someone…tell them and tell them why. Do not assume that they know you are mad.  I do not do anger but if I get irritated, I let the one I love know now that I am instead of carrying it around in what I call a cloak of anger or pouting. What good does that do? There are always two sides to every story and if I do not let a person know I am upset, then how can I expect to resolve anything? All I am doing is losing time with someone I love so I have to decide which is more important…pride or the person.

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I think being chronically ill has made me look at life differently. I realize that my time is shorter and that I can be gone in a flash and so I value each moment I have with loved ones. I look through eyes of love and compassion instead of impatience and self. This does not mean I never think of myself. It just means that I value more being with those I love than I do having material things or having life perfect. To me, love and those I love are more important than anything I could ever have.

Life is like looking through the lens of my camera….when I take a bad picture and do not like it, I just take another one. When we look at our lives and see only the ugly, I change my focus and find the beauty. The past few weeks have been filled with a lot of hardship and ugliness and pain for me and yet I found that when I changed my focus, I found things to be thankful for, things to laugh about and things to make life more beautiful. Just like during the procedure of having the needles put in my spine, my telling the doctor my new song for this procedure was “Great Balls of Fire” and I sang that line and he stopped for a second and continued singing the verse to the song “and you rattle my bones” and we all laughed….right in the middle of this painful procedure. I changed my focus to help me endure.

If we keep our focus on love and compassion, then we fill our lives with the greatest symphony of all. I see so much anger and hatred in the world today and it makes my heart sad. Sometimes being right is not always the way to go. Sometimes letting someone else have their moment is worth far more than being able to say “I told you so” or “you are wrong”.  I wish instead of the tidal wave of hatred and anger we see flowing around the world, we could start one of love and joy and care for others. And to do that, it begins with each one of us.

image from https://www.facebook.com/Gyalwa.Dokhampa.Khamtrul

Life is a choice. And chosing to live in harmony is a choice too. And what we choose to do influences what those around us do. I believe that the world can still work in harmony if only we all started choosing to love instead of hate and criticize.

video by wobbyhp