Soul Mates, Fate, and Breaking The Tie

Big deal. So you fell in love with someone. Don't you see what happened? This guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching. I mean you got zapped, kiddo.  But that love you felt, that's just the beginning.  You just got a taste of love. Wait til you see how much more deeply you can love than that. Heck, Groceries - you have the capacity to someday love the whole world.  It's your destiny.  Don't laugh."
"...I think the reason it's so hard for me to get over this guy is because I seriously believed David was my soul mate."
"He probably was. Your problem is you don't understand what that word means.  People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants.  But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.  But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.  And thank God for it. ..."

~ Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray Love

Within the first passage, I was hooked.  Who was this woman with such a familiar voice?  Her story wasn't mine, but it was like reading my own work, my own insight into life. (So modest of myself, I know, to compare my inner writing voice to that of an American autobio bestseller.  Ah, well, if I've learned anything this year it's that confidence oversells modesty everyday.) And so it was that I have been reading Eat, Pray, Love religiously every night for the last two weeks.  I've been cherishing it like I haven't cherished a book in years...

As a young reader, it would be nothing for me to be hooked on a book like this.  I read everything like it was speaking directly to me.  Since I read so much, I was an above average writer for my years, and so it began - this dream to be a writer, professionally.  Somehow, though, I'm only beginning to hit that path at anything more than a strolling pace.  Why was I so sluggish before? Gaining life experience? Trying to make money? Paying off debt? Not believing in myself? Terrified of the rejection to come before the success? Terrified of the pressure of success?

My life has happened this way for a reason.  I may not know, in the moment or even a week from the moment, why something unfolds the way it does, but I trust that it is happening exactly as it should...

This summer, I fell in love.  These were never words I shared with him, nor words - based on how he left things, and the feelings I have for him now - he ever needs to hear from me.  Why is it that I fall so quickly for not just this last guy, but every guy in my past?  I used to think it was because I was searching so desperately for love that I would pass it on to whoever might possibly be interested.  Was that the lesson I was meant to learn?  Yes, from the men before...but this one has sent me on a path of self-discovery so profound that I know there was more to it than that simple (yet very difficult) lesson I see so many women struggle their whole lives to realize.

My last grandparent died this summer.  As I've mentioned before, the employer I had at the time did not handle it AT ALL well.  But this was not a negative thing.  My grandmother had suffered from frontal lobe dimentia for years, and I look at her passing as a release from the torture of her disease, rather than the loss of a loved one.  She is with us more now than she has been for years.

I do not have a traditional understanding of religion.  I cannot honestly tell you that I believe one solitary power looks after us all and has a plan for everything that happens.  My understanding of what some people may call God is much more elaborate than that.  In the past, I have explained my God as the first grandparent who passed away, my maternal grandmother.  When I have come across a stroke of luck, or been saved from imminent danger, I have told myself and those close to me that it was my "Guardian Angel," my grandmother, who gave me so many things to be thankful for.

With the passing of my paternal grandmother, I now have two Guardian Angels looking down on me.  They come from two different upbringings, but both had so much love in their hearts, that their duties as Guardian Angels are easily split between all of their offspring.  In this time - on one of my most ardent spiritual journeys - I feel so blessed to have both of them for company.  Janet's quilt is kept close, and Marjorie's words fill my head on the days I need them the most.  They are both the role models I need now.

A month and a half after her death, Janet sent a helper my way.  He may have been a soul mate, as Gilbert has described it above.  He told me to do nothing of the decisions I was making with my life, which was best. Yes, I am adamant in this fact, if only because I had that part criticized most by the people who love me so much and watched me, terrified, through all of these changes. I rejected any actual advice he ever provided me as arrogant prattle coming from a trainer's mouth.  Every decision I made to change my life at that time came from inside.  I took the energy I got get from him and worked with it to inspire a life plan - or lack thereof - that I had dreamed of for years.  And I'm living that life now.  And isn't it great?  I love the moment I am in now.  He was, as my dear friend described him, a catalyst for the changes that needed to be made.

He was passionate; he loved life; I brought great joy into his; he gave me a list of reasons to love myself more with; and then he left.  To be fair, I had left first, but his leave was more permanent.  There was no "goodbye;" there was no guidance on how we could make this work; there was no effort on his part to actual try to make it work...

I thought I had failed.  I thought it was all my fault.  I believed all those dating books I had ever read and figured I had pushed too much, or exposed my feelings too quickly, or scared him away with the pressure of being exactly who I am... But that's a load of bullocks!  He was the one who talked about the "future." He brought up the fact that his grandparents were married three weeks after they met one another.  He even admitted to thinking about me all day when we barely knew one another.  I had this feeling that he would be in my life for a few months, and this talk terrified me a bit...as did me feelings...

He is in my life for only a few months.  This is it.  Tonight I cut all ties to him - figuratively and mentally.  (This weekend, I came across a video on meditation that I will follow through with tonight.  I'll include the link to it in this post, in case any readers need to get rid of bad energy as well. )  Tonight I confirmed that he has moved on - engaged to somebody again, already - and thinks of me as nothing more than a pearl on the "string of women" he once described the people he had dated.  It was fun.  It was crazy.  It was passion. And he was a good person.  Sadly, we share too much of the same music as favourites. Time and experience, though, have taught me that that's all he is.  I'll hear Buble's hit from last summer and now always think of him...and cry, maybe, but that's ok.  Why stay stuck in the past if it only makes you cry out in pain?  I'll change my iPod instead...

Marjorie took him away.  The day he told me of his "great opportunity," I knew we needed to slow things down.  I knew I needed to regain some sense of myself.  Marj saw this, too, and she gave me an out.  It would have been worse if it had lasted longer.  These things always are.  If it had piddled out and died from over-watering, I would have wasted more time in recovery, I'm sure.  As it is, I feel I've spent too long in this place.  I've wasted my energy mourning something that I've been bigger than this entire time.  Waiting to get the closure from him that would have meant something more than the silence I heard over the phone, I know it doesn't work that way.  It was over the moment I got that call on the lrt.  The moment I made the choice to be myself - spending time with my BFF instead - was the moment Marjorie began to cut the cord.  Now it's my turn to finish snipping...

He was "a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. ...probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.  But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah.  Too painful..."


The link to the vlog on cord-cutting:

http://gabbyb.tv/vlogging/vlog-cord-cutting

Walks, Artists, and the Discovery of One's Self

There was this summer I had one time that changed my entire world...  Since then I've had so many seasons that have changed my life that it seems absurd to remember them all.  This one, though, was the beginning of Edumusication.  As this winter is proofing, many wonderful things in my life begin with Edumusication...

I walked fifty blocks on my day off.  Fifty blocks in the sunshine of a Vancouver summer to just enjoy the sunshine...and stop in at The Book Store...before hitting up the beach.  It was a brilliant walk (and I think I was even sporting me orange crocs, which a few coworkers avoided commenting on), and I followed it up with a voyage into The Book Store.

(The Book Store is code for the large book chain I gave two and half years of my life to.  I may have also given them my family's last hopes of me ever being satisfied with a "normal" job...)

I remember the heat of the sun beating down on my pale white skin as I made my way along Main Street...but I didn't stay on that street long.  This was the first time I began my exploratory routes through the neighbourhoods between my house and The Book Store.  The voyages would continue for the rest of that summer (yet sadly fade away into nothing the next summer), and I discovered some amazing places, (and extremely wealthy homes). 

Once I made it into my second home, ear plugs blaring, pumping my legs and nodding my head along to the song coursing through my body, I bounded up the escalator and retreated into my favourite section.  I can't remember which book I needed to find that day, but I do remember tapping my foot to the song, shaking my hips a bit and continuing to nod my head as I performed a search at the closest computer terminal.

"Can I help you?" this stranger asked me.

I turned, smiled, and took out my earplugs.  "Oh, hi, no, thanks." I gave him my biggest grin (and I didn't even know its power at this time), and introduced myself.  "I'm Jodi, you mus be new," and I read his name tag aloud as I shook his hand.

"Yeah, I am.  But I've heard of you." Now, sentences like that are always nice to hear, so my smile continued.

"Only good things, I hope!"

"Yeah, don't worry."  And the conversation may have gone in a few other directions before we got to this comment that has always stood out in my mind.  "I saw this girl over here, busting a move at the computer and I just thought, man, she looks so happy..."

And I was. 

That summer was filled with so much.  So many things happened in my head that it's hard to even think of who I was before that summer.  But this was one of those really good days.  Yeah, one of those days that would make me wonder if I was possibly bi-polar because my highs can get so high, and my lows can go pretty low.  Luckily, I understand that pop psychology is wrong in diagnozing mental disorders, and I just feel things pretty deeply...it's the artist side of me screaming to get out, I suppose...

I stopped, halfway through my walk, to eat in a restuarant by myself. 

Yes, alone.

Trust me, if you've never done this, you've never lived!  It took a lot of courage for me to order by myself, and I hid my face in a book to avoid the embarassment of not doing anything - like talking to the person I was dining with, 'cuz that would have been crazy - while I waited for my food to come.  I had hidden whichever book I was currently reading in a cover we were selling at The Book Store, so nobody knew that I was devouring the lastest historical thriller to come since Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian.  The server stopped by my table inbetween taking my order and just before my food was delivered.  "Are you reading the Bible?" she asked.  "Uh, no," I said, concerned that they thought I was that "freak" who was eating by herself.* "Oh, we (she pointed to the bartender) thought that's why you might be hiding it..." I went on to explain to her that I was trying to protect my book, you see, because I had only borrowed it, not bought it...but we have these cool little bookholders at The Book Store, if she was interested. (Always the sales person, ...for the companies I work for, not myself...)

It wasn't the most popular book in the world that made me into that girl bopping along to whatever tune was playing.  It wasn't even the server asking me if I was reading the Bible.  Perhaps it was the music I was listening to, 'cause I listen to some stellar tunes :-D But I think it was more than that.  Somewhere along my journey that day, and that summer, I found myself.  I found the person strong enough to eat in a restaurant by herself.  I found the woman who could walk fifty blocks to search for a book.  I found the artist who went hunting for inspiration in the city she was loving.  I found myself.

I've lost her a few times.  But not today.  Today, I found her again, and I found my zen.  I took a walk on a sunny day, and turned off my music to reach that zen place.  I listened to the sloshing of the boots on the sidewalk, and the splashing of car tires in the melting roadways.  I breathed in the crisp, January air.  The sun soaked my cheeks in warmth, and the wind whipped my skin dry, but I didn't care.  I experienced the city.  I went hunting for inspiration in the city I am loving...and I found myself again.

Hmmmm...what a great day!


I'll share this GREAT Song with you to commemorate it....yes, apparently, sunshine always helps me find myself :-D




*DISCLAIMER: These are the thoughts of mine at that time, not my thoughts today.  I think it is absolutely fine for you to go to a restaurant and read the Bible.  I DO NOT think that makes you into a freak...but if it did, I would still be your friend.  I enjoy people who read religious texts. :-D