Lessons in Love

If you find yourself in love with someone who does not love you, be gentle with yourself. There is nothing wrong with you. Love just didn't choose to rest in the other person’s heart.

If you find someone else in love with you and you don't love him/her, feel honored that love came and called at your door, but gently refuse the gift you cannot return. Do not take advantage, do not cause pain.

How you deal with love is how you deal with you, and all our hearts feel the same pains and joys, even if our lives and ways are different.

If you fall in love with another, and he/she falls in love with you, and then love chooses to leave, do not try to reclaim it or to assess blame, let it go. There is a reason and there is a meaning. You will know in time.

Remember that you don't choose love. Love chooses you. All you can really do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing, then reach out and give it away.

Give it back to the person who brought it alive in you.

Give it to others who deem it poor in spirit. Give it to the world around you in anyway you can. There is where many lovers go wrong. Having been so long without love, they understand love only as a need. They see their hearts as empty places that will be filled by love, and they begin to look at love as something that flows to them rather than from them.

The first blush of new love is filled to overflowing, but as their love cools, they revert to seeing their love as need. They cease to be someone who generates love and instead become someone who seeks love.

They forget that the secret of love is that it is a gift, and that it can be made to grow only by giving it away.

Remember this, and keep it to your heart. Love has its own time, its own seasons, and its own reason for coming and going. You cannot bribe it or coerce it, or reason it into saying. You can only embrace it when it arrives and give it away when it comes to you. But if it chooses to leave from your heart or from the heart of your lover, there is nothing you can do and there is nothing you should do.

Love always has been and always will be a mystery.Be glad that it came to live for a moment in your life.

Final Fantasy X - Dido

Sailor Moon Music Video - Dido - White Flag

Does Love Wear Out With Time?

Love is not based on the feeling that I love or do not love someone. Moreover, it evolves with time. When a couple show their love in a different manner or less visibly this does not mean that it no longer exists.

It is true however, that different temperaments, time and suffering may bring on difficulties in the relationship.

So how can love not wear out?

By encouraging it to grow. We do not love just because the other person is lovable. Making love grow means wanting the happiness of your partner. It is also looking for the good that he or she does and not always keeping track of all the negative things. It is wanting to please your partner and giving freely. It often means taking the first step...

Love is based on a mutual decision to live out a committment and not on the limitations that we may discover in ourselves. For example, if your parents are divorced, this does not mean that you are condemned to get divorced. You can build an authentic relationship based on love, forgiveness and being forgiven. So there is no need for fatalism. To decide to love means to renew that choice every day and to work at deepening the relationship.

In order to make love grow, we have to let love be rooted in Love. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Rom 7:19) When God created man and woman, marriage and love were in harmony. If we are open to what God has to say, we will understand that because of original sin we are inclined to behave badly. This is what undermines love: arguments, anger, neglecting the other’s needs, selfishness....

But with God, we can escape from our failures. He invites us, while respecting our freedom, to be connected to Love once again, to acknowledge our faults and to allow ourselves to be re-created. In the sacrament of marriage, we receive the capacity to renew our love by drawing on the Love of God.

Hat-Making Contest

My daughter, Patricia, from the school parade of hats
- out of newspaper, and crepe paper.

Happiness is a Voyage

We convince ourselves that life will be better once we are married, have a baby, then another.

Then we get frustrated because our children are not old enough, and that all will be well when they are older.

Then we are frustrated because they reach adolescence and we must deal with them.
Surely we'll be happier when they grow out of the teen years.

We tell ourselves our life will be better when our spouse gets his/her acts together, when we have a nicer car, when we can take a vacation, when we finally retire.

The truth is that there is no better time to be happy than right now.
If not, then when?

Your life will always be full of challenges.
It is better to admit as much and to decide to be happy in spite of it all.

For the longest time, it seemed that life was about to start. Real life.
But there was always some obstacle along the way, an ordeal to get through, some work to be finished, some time to be given, a bill to be paid.
Then life would start.
I finally come to understand that those obstacles were life.

That point of view helped me see that there isn't any road to happiness.

HAPPINESS IS THE ROAD!

So, enjoy every moment stop waiting for school to end, for a return to school, to lose ten pounds, to gain ten pounds, for work to begin, to get married, for friday evening, for sunday morning, waiting for a new car, for your mortgage to be paid off, for spring, for summer, for fall, for winter, for the first or the fifteenth of the month, for your song to be played on the radio, to die, to be reborn ... before deciding to be happy.

HAPPINESS IS A VOYAGE,
not a destination.
There is no better time to be happy than ... NOW!

Live and enjoy the moment.

- Author Unknown