To all the inner children

As it comes around to Valentine's Day, I realize I'm not really into the bright red and pink plastic sentimentality of the holiday anymore. Not to bash it, it's a lovely holiday, celebrating love and all. I've just decided I can make my own meaning out of it.

In my supervision group today, we ended up talking about love and how in other cultures there are a number of words for "love". There certainly are a number of experiences associated with the single word! I know that, if you pay attention, and your heart is willing, you can feel a lot of love in a single day. Driving into work this morning, I saw my client on the corner, sipping his Dunkin Donuts coffee, probably somewhat anxiously enjoying the falling white snow flakes. And my heart fluttered with gentle affection.

Then as I was leaving work, a client inquired at the desk about when I'd be seeing her. We checked her appointment time and it was actually scheduled for tomorrow. By this time she had been waiting for close to two hours. I saw anger cross her face, and tears well in her eyes. In that moment, my heart ached for this woman, who in so many ways is just a child in an adult's body. She, and many clients, remind me that we all have an inner child to tend to who feels angry, sad, afraid and unsure at times.

I believe in many ways I have been trying to defend against coming to deeply care for my clients, maybe even for the people in my life. Real love is so inconvenient! When you love, you naturally put others' needs ahead of your own. Maybe something about this is terrifying, like if i surrender to love, my needs won't be met. And when you love, you will feel some pain.

Love and pain: Two sides of the same coin? The same currency at least. There's pain in loving people we lose or who are far away, pain in feeling that love is imperfect. There's pain in having to endure the struggles of those we love. But I guess I'm willing to risk it, for the sake of wholeness. To shut down the richness of this human experience seems a great tragedy. As I traverse the reaches of this conscious-emotional universe, I hope not to turn away from the dark moments, because these too contain love. But I will savor the moments of lightness. Maybe I'll take the cheesy candlelit dinner after all.