The Journey

In the Spring of 2006, I packed up my car, gave my roommates a final farewell, and headed down the road. I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going or where I would live next, but I knew I had to leave where I was. Life seemed to have run its course under my present circumstances and I was floundering for direction, momentum and meaning.

I ended up on a week long road trip to the Florida Keys where I confronted a few old ghosts, met a few friendly folks and began to seriously contemplate the issues in my life. I went scuba diving for the first time since I was 13 and encountered a beautiful pod of dolphins with deep scarring on their backs. They spoke to me of resiliency and healing. They spoke to me of the persistence of beauty in spite of trauma.

I strolled down Sunset Boulevard and watched the street acts perform. I happened upon an old and weathered palm reader who spoke to me of the lines on my hand, the power in my words and the need for me to let go and find peace with my past in order to move forward. His warmth engulfed me like a blanket and I found the universal truth in his message which surpassed any questions about the authenticity of palm divining.

In a brief exchange, a random stranger sitting poolside at the hotel made a comment to me about the importance and power of forgiveness. She laid down a heavy book on the side of her pool chair – a book I wouldn’t encounter myself for another 2 years. Her words landed like bricks on my heart.

No doubt about it, the universe was speaking to me clearly and directly. There were a number of divine encounters on this little escapade and I felt newly inspired and more hopeful than I had in my whole life. It was a revelatory adventure, and although I was by myself, I’d never felt less alone.

By the start of summer that year, I found myself in Ocean City, MD where I ended up on a whim thanks to the urging of a casual actor friend I’d known from my recent theater days. Through her, I landed a job on the Ocean City Beach Patrol and just barely managed to find a place to live a day or two before the patrol season started. It was rough going there. Around the time I hit Ocean City, the winds of fortune had shifted and I came plummeting down to earth with a crash. I found my time in Ocean City to be the opposite of my recent adventure. I was lonelier than I’d ever been (perhaps due to the sudden contrast to my recent experience) and life was bleak and uninspired. My only solace was getting to sit by the ocean for 8 hours a day and commune with the waves.

What had I done wrong to swing so quickly and so far to the opposite end of the spectrum? I felt more lost and disconnected than ever. Every morning and every evening, I drug my 300 lb guard’s chair on my back through the loose sand down to the water’s edge and back up to the dunes again. It was no heavier than the gloom that already rested there.

By the end of the summer, I was all too glad to leave Ocean City…all except for a matter of the heart that took place over my last few weeks there. I’d met a guy, around my age, who’d brought my world back into full technicolor brilliance during our short time together. It was one of those encounters from which the movies derive their first-kiss-fireworks sort of plots. When I found myself back in Charleston that fall, I experienced a period of grief and depression over the unexpected heartbreak resulting from that brief romance. I had not signed up for any of that, but there I was. And that’s when it happened: That’s when I had my first epiphany about this little thing we call Love.

I was driving across the James Island connector, deeply immersed in sad thoughts about my situation. As I reached the long string of cars sitting at the stop light at the end and came to a halt, an entirely new thought appeared in my mind, seemingly out of nowhere. The thought said something like, “You’re only sad because you think that you have to stop Loving.” Wait, what? I went back through it… “You’re only sad because you think that you have to stop Loving.” I still felt a little confounded, but I followed the thread of thought and here’s where it led:

Love doesn’t end. We stop it. We stop it if and when we think that we have to. Usually, this is due to some conflict, disappointment or disillusionment. Worse, due to a perceived rejection. But the reality is that the choice to stop Loving is always just that: a choice. And that choice is never dependent on anyone or anything outside of us. (But usually we will blame something or someone outside of us.)

But the real source of my pain, the true agony I was experiencing, was from the belief that I had to stop Loving just because something ended. It goes something like, “They hurt me, so I can’t love them anymore” or “They don’t love me anymore so now I have to stop loving them” or a myriad of similar love-squashing thoughts. My little epiphany was that…drum roll…this is not true!

This may sound ridiculously simple to you as epiphanies, when attempted to be reduced to mere words, often do. But I can assure you the realization was quite transcendent at the time. Maybe if you can tap into it’s essence, you can feel it too?

I realized within that moment that I did not have to stop Loving at all. Even if my situation and my circumstances did not change to my liking, and I did not have the beautiful, reciprocal experience that I’d wanted, I could still Love the other person to my little heart’s content. And I felt tremendously better in that moment. It’s not that all my pain evaporated. No, indeed, there was still some sadness and still some Ben & Jerry’s. But I discovered that the truest and deepest pain came from simply cutting off the flow of Love within myself.

Simply put: I found that it is profoundly liberating to Love like you don’t give a fuck. I’ve come back to this lesson many times over the years and many times I’ve found the same relief and the same liberation from remembering this truth.

The thing about Love is…it’s not actually dependent on anything. It’s just this thing that exists within us. We can either tap into it or we can shut it down. It’s entirely up to us. But the universal human experience is to feel joy, peace and contentment whenever we do manage to tap into it. And sadly, we tend to believe that when “Love” (romance, etc) doesn’t go our way, that we have to shut it down within ourselves. I’m just here to say, we really don’t have to. We can allow ourselves to experience just as much Love as we want, within ourselves. It doesn’t require anyone else’s permission or participation. It’s not dependent upon anyone else’s behavior, acceptance or approval.

I felt it throughout my entire road trip to southern Florida and back, and I grieved it’s absence in the months that followed. But both the lock and the key to this door were right there within me all along.

In recent months, this old Love Lesson has resurfaced for greater understanding. I’ve discovered new, fascinating elements. For one, I’ve discovered that Loving like you don’t give a fuck does not mean accepting or tolerating abuse. In fact, that’s not love at all. That’s just fear. And I’ve also learned that it does not mean condoning or turning a blind eye to abuse. And this is where the new aspect of the lesson gets really interesting to me.

Even in the face of great rage and great suffering, I have recently found that old ability within myself to tap into that deep experience of Love. At times, I have even felt a deep sense of love and compassion toward the very entities who have exploited, neglected, used or abused me unabashedly and extravagantly. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have any anger and that I don’t still hold them responsible for their destruction, but that experience of love within myself is a warm, healing salve for me. And that’s the important point I think is so often missing in pop culture spirituality: It’s not all or nothing, one or the other. Not yet. Not at this super fallible, super human stage.

I am so put off by the spiritual-ease mentality of popular culture in our society that’s all “love, light, rainbows” and even toxic positivity. It smacks of cotton candy to me. Too much of it will make you sick and send you chucking up your nachos on this roller coaster we call life. It lacks substance; it lacks authenticity.

I believe great suffering has opened me to deep Loving. The purifying fire of rage and the cooling depths of Love’s presence somehow coexist quite peacefully within me. I needn’t deny one to experience the other, and somehow, I believe denying one would greatly diminish the healing power of the other. Pretending to be all “love and light” without traversing that bed of nails of raw rage, hurt and anguish within ourselves cannot result in true growth.

But what do I know? I’m just talking out of my ass here.

This is simply what I’ve found to be true. I may not have experienced a lot of externally Loving conditions in my life, but that doesn’t prohibit me from experiencing Love within myself – and truthfully, that’s all that’s required to be happy.