When the rain is blowing in your face And the whole world is on your case I could offer you a warm embrace To make you feel my love
When evening shadows and the stars appear And there is no one to dry your tears I could hold you for a million years To make you feel my love
I know you haven't made your mind up yet But I would never do you wrong I've known it from the moment that we met There's no doubt in my mind where you belong
I'd go hungry, I'd go black and blue I'd go crawling down the avenue There ain't nothing that I wouldn't do To make you feel my love
The storms of rage on a rolling sea Down that highway of regret The wind of change is blowing wild and free But you ain't seen nothing like me yet
There ain't nothing that I wouldn't do Go to the end of the earth for you Make you happy make your dreams come true To make you feel my love
When love ends... How long should you hold on? How soon should you let go? How do you move on?
For the past days, I was trying to search for answers.
Some said that there is second chance for everything, but what if that second chance is a no chance at all? Because there was no chance in the first place. And what if the thing that I consider a "chance" right now is not a chance at all?
A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you're willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you've spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don't see coming, when we don't have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that's when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.
Remember when we were little, and we would accidentally bite a kid on the playground? Our teachers would go "Say you're sorry." And we would say it, but we wouldn't mean it. Because the stupid kid we bit, totally deserved it. But, as we get older, making amends isn't so simple. After the playground days are over, you can't just say it. You have to mean it. Of course, when you become much older, sorry is not a happy word. It means this is really gonna hurt. No matter how hard you try, no matter how good your intentions, you are going to make mistakes. You’re going to hurt people. You’re going to get hurt. And if you ever want to recover... there’s really only one thing you can say. Forgive and forget. That’s what they say. It’s good advice, but it’s not very practical. When someone hurts us, we want to hurt them back. When someone wrongs us, we want to be right. Without forgiveness, old scores are never settled… old wounds never heal. And the most we can hope for, is that one day we’ll be lucky enough to forget.
As human beings, we can't undo our mistakes, and we rarely forgive ourselves for them. But, it's a hazard of the trade. But, as human beings we can always try to do better. To be better. To right a wrong. Even when it feels irreversible. Of course, I'm sorry doesn't always cut it. Maybe because we use it so many different ways. As a weapon. As an excuse. But, when we are really sorry, when we use it right. When we mean it. When our actions say what words never can. When we get it right "I'm sorry" is perfect. When we get it right, "I'm sorry" is redemption.
Maybe we're not supposed to be happy. Maybe gratitude has nothing to do with joy. Maybe being grateful means recognizing what you have for what it is. Appreciating small victories. Admiring the struggle it takes simply to be human. Maybe we're thankful for the familiar things we know. And maybe we're thankful for the things we'll never know. At the end of the day, the fact that we have the courage to still be standing is reason enough to celebrate.
Unrequited love feels like death. In fact, there are times when death would seem preferable to the unrelenting pain and frustration. There are those, even in the Church, who would seek to minimize or make light of this most unique agony: “Oh, don’t worry about it! Women (or men) are like street cars, there’s another one along any minute!” Like Hell. I don’t think there is any other pain quite like that of unrequited love, especially when rejection is involved, although that might even be preferable to being strung along with hopes raised and dashed with punishing regularity. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a wish fulfilled is the tree of life.” (Proverbs 13:12)
Even the death of a loved one has a clean finality to it, and, normally, is not a deliberate choice on the part of the other to be free of you. Advice from others all sounds cliché. Especially from those well meaning but insensitive vocational terrorists who zoom in with, “Well, maybe God wants you for himself! Have you considered that possibility?” As if you haven’t. Besides, someone heartbroken from rejection, grief, and loss is in no mood to have the joys of celibacy preached at them. The subject of vocation is holy ground where we take off our shoes and tread softly, not go charging in with golf cleats and glib answers. Especially when it’s someone else’s vocation. Unrequited love is real valid agony. And no one has a right to rob you of it so cheaply, especially if they’re stacking false guilt over “not following God’s will” on top of it. It must be endured. And can be.
Unrequited love is the very pain of God. The Crucifix is a snapshot of unrequited love. God doesn’t minimize this pain. Suffering it can be a profound identification with Christ’s pain over the lack of appreciation He receives from His Bride. Suffering can be an expression of love and profound sanity. Without love all is demonic chaos. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis said he never imagined grief felt so much like fear. And so it should. Grief follows separation and echoes the ultimate calamity of separation from God. As the unity of man and woman in one flesh mirrors the image and likeness of God, so too the separation of man from woman conjures the cruelty and fragmentation of Hell. But some loves must die, if they are not from God they are not really loves anyway, but still it hurts, like Hell. All death hurts like Hell, because God did not make it. (See Wisdom 1:13-14) But He did redeem it by entering into our separations.
"Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried." Thoreau wrote that and it's not meant as something trivial.
I woke up early this morning, and I noticed I am running late for my meeting/interview that was scheduled a day before. After the interview, I found myself running again to meet my boss for a presentation with our President/CEO. Reports, letters, emails, and other meetings I have done this whole day. I went home dead tired with a little energy to write this entry. I am always chasing time. And sometimes I find 24 hours of a day is not really enough to everything that I need to do. We hurry too much, pure and simple. As Henri Nouwen describes it: "One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like overpacked suitcases bursting at the seams. It fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligation." We are always hurrying.
What's wrong with hurrying? Any doctor, police officer, spiritual director, or over-worked mother, can answer that: Hurrying causes tension, high blood-pressure, accidents, and robs us of the simple capacity to be in the moment.
However, we can take this further in the light of faith. Spiritual people see hurry as an obstacle to spiritual growth. Donald Nicholl, for example, says "hurry is a form of violence exercised upon time", an attempt, as it were, to make time God's time our own, our private property. What he and others suggest is that, in hurrying, we exercise a form of greed and gluttony? How so?
Too often we have a rather simplistic notion of greed and gluttony. We imagine greed, for example, as hoarding money and possessions, as being selfish, hard-hearted, like Scrooge in the Dicken's Christmas tale. Indeed, that kind of greed exists, though it's not the prerogative of many. For most of us, greed takes a different, more subtle form. More than money, we hoard experience. We try to drink in the world, all of it. We would like to travel to every place, see everything, feel every sensation, not miss out on anything. We constantly hurry what we're doing so as to be available to do something else. We try to juggle too many things at the same time precisely because we want too many things. The possessions we really want are experience, knowledge, sensation, achievement, status. We're greedy in a way Scrooge never was.
Gluttony works essentially the same. For most of us, the urge to consume is not so much about food or drink, but about experience. Our propensity to over-eat (particularly in an age that is so sensitive to health and fashion) generally has little to do with food and infinitely more to do with other kinds of consumption. We are always in a hurry because we are forever restless to taste more of life.
It's this kind of hurry, subtly driven by greed and gluttony, that can be a form of violence exercised upon time and can constitute an obstacle to holiness.
But there are other kinds of hurry that come from simple circumstance and duty. Almost everyone of us, at least during our working years, have too many things to do: Daily, we struggle to juggle the demands of relationships, family, work, school, church, child-care, shopping, attention to health, concern for appearance, house-work, preparing meals, rent and mortgage payments, car payments, commuting to and from work, bus schedules, unwanted accidents, unforeseen interruptions, illnesses, and countless other things that eat up more time than is seemingly available.
The gospels tell us that even Jesus was so busy at times that he didn't have time to eat. That's not surprising. Robert Moore once said that the mark of a true adult is that "he or she does what it takes". Sometimes that means being stretched to the limit, being over-extended, having to juggle too many things all at once, driving faster than we'd like, working to the point of exhaustion, even as there is still more that we should ideally be doing.
There's a hurriedness that doesn't come from greed or gluttony and that can't be dismissed with the simplistic judgement: "That's what she gets for trying to have it all!" Sometimes we have to hurry just to make do and simple circumstance and duty eat up every available minute of our time. That's not necessarily an obstacle to holiness, but can be one of its paths.
I learned an important lesson today.
Still we have to be careful not to rationalize. God didn't make a mistake in creating time, God made enough of it, and when we can't find enough time and, as the Psalmist says, find ourselves getting up ever earlier and going to bed ever later because we have too much to do, we need to see this as a sign that sooner or later we had better make some changes. When we hurry too much and for too long we end up doing violence to time, to ourselves, and to our blood pressure.
This morning, it is raining in my country. Water slides down the leaves like tongue on skin. The sound of their falling collects like breath on the lobes of ears. You are a continent away. There, the leaves are beginning to turn. Soon, night will steal hours from day, and snow will be whirling in drifts.
But you are here, in the country of my mind, wiping away the maps of mist on the window pane. lying beside me, as the pulse of the pillows and sheets --- even the very throb of rain --- begin to quicken.
I always wonder, is it really possible for us to love someone from afar?
The other night I was lying on the grass, trying to watch the stars under the canopy of trees. I was listening to a familiar song by Sting, his remake of "Someone To Watch Over Me." One line of the song, it captured the mood of the moment. "there is somebody I'm longing to see... i hope that she turns out to be... someone to watch over me.." that song reminded me of someone's hope that the right person will come along.
Last week, a friend of mine left a message in my ym. She told me, "it's confirmed. He has someone new." I wasn't surprised at all. And I told her before that to be ready for this kind of reality. He is in the US while you are still here. We are still human beings, and prone to such needs like intimacy. Though I knew some people who have maintained such, but the truth is, it is really hard to have a long distance relationship.
The hardest part of loving is when we have to love from afar. Distance is sometimes the ultimate factor that decides whether two people in love would falter to succeed. It can be a poison that can slowly paralyze even the healthiest of relationships. It is this very reason why it would be difficult, if not totally impossible.
If we really love someone, then you could just hold on to that feeling for as long as you want. But, there can never be a guarantee that we will find fulfillment in it because we are separated by miles of ocean and deep sea of doubt that tells you that really isn't over until its over.
It's never too late to start all over again. It would be a difficult task but it's worth the effort if it's for someone we love. Trust with your heart. Believe that time and distance can never stand against two people who are destined for each other. If the love we have for that person remains as strong as it was before, then never let anyone take that away from us.
I guess we have to take a chance and if it doesn't work out, at least we know we did our best. Just make sure we have learned your lesson well so the next time love calls, we'll never have to fall flat on our face again.
As I lie down on the grass, and see the stars under the canopy of trees... I sang with Sting silently while looking at a far away star, saying... "wont you tell her to put on some speed, follow my lead, oh how I need... someone to watch... over me..."
