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Dalton
Roberts |
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Anyone who knows about my rocky marital road might wonder why I would write about love here on the threshold of Valentine’s Day. I guess they think a loser has no right to write about love. What if I don’t think I am a loser? What if I actually feel, in the words of a great song, that “love’s been good to me”? The simple truth about love is that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. There is a transcendent truth about the times you lose. It is that you often win some beautiful things even when you lose a person you love. I started losing in love in elementary school. My first little sweetheart was playing in a tubful of water in her basement when she reached up and grabbed an electrical cord and was electrocuted. I still have her picture. I look at her and tell her she was the prettiest girl in our school. I tell her that I still feel so much sweetness for her that my heart aches and sometimes overflows. You may think it is immature or even silly for me to re-experience her after all these years. All I can tell you is that all those early feelings have remained. It feels now just as it did the first time I held hands with her. No angel has ever had a more beautiful smile and I can see it now with the eyes of my heart just as clearly as I saw her back then with my physical eyes. Only once in my life have I given up on love. It was after a divorce in which I felt used and abused. Before I even became aware of it, I was disparaging women and saying they cannot be trusted. Then I thought about all the women who had been completely loyal and kind to me, including my mother, sister and several dear friends. My rational mind overcame that old judgmental mind that can steal all your joy and bury it under the corpses of old memories. I made a definite decision long ago to not live in a perpetual state of hate or regret. It should come as no surprise to acknowledge that love requires courage. How could it not? It is the deepest and most powerful emotion we experience. The intensity of all our emotions determines how reactive we will be when they are thwarted. I have known people who lost a lover and never made any effort to love again. I am thinking every person could remember something similar. Yes, love requires courage. Even successful long-term marriages require courage. My parents were married over 60 years but I saw situations as early as my childhood where they had to have the courage to try again. They loved each other devotedly but both of them were strong personalities and they disagreed on politics, religion and child-rearing at times and some of those differences were sharp and painful. As I look back, I am as proud of their courage in those tough times as the tenderness that characterized most of their relationship. Courage and tenderness are marvelously symbiotic. That was the formula that worked for my parents. Even more clearly than I remember their sharp differences do I recall how gentle and tender they were with each other. Not just at times of illness but in the routine activities of daily life. One of the clearest memories in my mind is the way they held hands as they rode down the road in their little VW, or sat together in church or at the kitchen table. Tenderness is the soul food that gives us the juice for the courage. This Valentine’s Day let us hold in the arms of grateful memory everyone who ever held us in their heart. And by all means, remember the tender moments. It will keep you from getting old and cold.
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