The Ebb and Flow of Relationship, Episode 466
This episode explores how genuine relationship requires us to release our need for the ones we love to remain unchanged, and grief and love as two inseparable dimensions of the same human experience.
How might we live gracefully in our relationships with their inevitable ebb and flow and, instead of demanding they stay constant, learn to trust the very natural movement in them as we would learn to trust the tides? And what might we need to discover about ourselves in order to make this possible?
Hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Our source for this week:
The Ebb and Flow of Relationship
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Photo by Hrvoje_Photography on Unsplash