Your life is a pinball.
Shooting up high you start bouncing between bumpers and fly between flippers which smack you every which way. Your life soars and crashes in ways you can’t predict. First loves with teenage girls, secret kisses in college worlds, all shape your heart and who you are today.
Curled in shaggy basement carpets and cushions in front of the record player your boyfriend carefully drops the needle on a worn album and you listen while making out in front of the Lava Lamp. Big brown speakers crackle and pop with simple harmonies that never leave your heart.
Cramped in a rusty hatchback in an snowy parking lot at midnight you stall your girlfriend’s car for the sixth straight time. “Let go of the clutch a little softer … ,” she suggests, as you slowly learn how to drive standard, and slowly learn how much patience helps you along.
Lazily lying in bed on Sunday morning with sunbeams softly shining across his sleeping face, you realize how much you needed to let yourself go … and start trusting someone again. Now it’ll be easier the next time.
Stop and give yourself time to flash back.
To all the relationships you were in … that ended before today.
Maybe your boyfriend went to college and stopped calling every day or your fiance got cold feet and suddenly moved away. Maybe he got drunk and kissed another girl or you got a passport and started seeing the world. Maybe filling the nest flipped your lives or emptying the nest flopped it. Or maybe you were in a relationship where you couldn’t really explain it but smiled sad smiles with weary wet eyes because you both just knew it was over.
But no matter where you were, no matter where you went, your life was shaped by those you met along the way. First loves may have helped you strive for a more optimistic life, helped you share laughs with strangers on sidewalks, or have kickstarted a lifelong quest for more and more passionate work.
There’s no papers showing how you look at love and no papers that say much about living. There’s no papers showing how you learned to pack a mean trunk, sing onstage at the bar, and make those over-easy eggs with enough drizzly yolk for dipping.
Lost loves, long loves, long gone … sometimes last forever in your heart.
And it’s okay to miss relationships. It’s okay to look back. Don’t be afraid of exploring that heart and flipping through that dusty deck of cards in your head as they photo-flash images from your beautiful life. Like they say, it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. So feel those memories of past loves, smile at the good times you’ve shared, and remember all the pieces of you that came from somebody who cared.
Those memories and those moments make us richer, make us wiser, make us better, and make us us.
This one’s for everyone who helped make you
AWESOME!
—
Wow!!!
The Happiness Equation is still #1 on The Globe’s Canadian and International Bestseller lists! Three weeks since debuting — and counting! Thank you!
Neil
