Wants

Life is hard.  The details can be downright brutal.  In the sixty-five years I've lived there have been so many disappointments, so many betrayals, so many heart wrenching events that if I had known about them before I was born I might have decided not to be born. If that had been an option.

But it wasn't. The big things never seem to be an option.  I have so little control. I make so many mistakes. And the truth is: if I could do them over I might just make different mistakes.

I have had a few big dreams in my life, a couple of videos that I thought would make my life perfect.  I was going to grow up to design magnificent, unique homes for people, write books that people couldn't put down, raise my children on ten acres of woodland on the water where the love of my life and our children would be wrapped in the sunshine of our love from sunrise to sunrise.  I wanted friends forever and grandmas and grandpas who would drop in with pies and stories and more love.

It just doesn't work that way -- for anyone.

The best I learned to hope for were the moments.  The glimpses of those things I want the most.  Maybe not for a lifetime, or a year, or even a week.  Just glancing moments that help me see and feel and know a little bit of those dreams.

The filter of my life determines how I experience everything and it is the same for everyone else.  Put all of us in the same situation and each of us would come out in our own way. Loving, really loving, means trying to understand what another actually needs from me and then trying to give it to the best of my ability.  Knowing that my needs and their needs may even be at odds with each other, I sometimes have to make a choice.

Do I do the hard thing, the thing that maybe leaves a hole in me because I love them so much that is the best?

Am I strong enough to live, to make the best of those glancing moments and learn to feel the satisfaction of knowing I wanted to love well, to love right, to be the best I could even when what I did turned out differently than I hoped?

That kind of selfless is not always within my grasp.  It's not always possible, no matter how great my love.  It can be a goal though and with that come those glancing moments when things are so beautiful the intensity of them is enough to carry me on until the next one.

Maybe that intensity is only tolerable in glancing moments, but I always want more.