Posts Tagged ‘relationship’

And so she pedals on.

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Being in a relationship is like riding a bicycle built for two. To get anywhere you have to first figure out how to balance the thing together. Pedal in unison. Be each other’s eyes and ears. Collaborate on the go. Deal with the unexpected and minimize collisions. When you do fall off, you try to cushion the blow for your fellow rider. Tend to injuries and help each other get back on.

There is a woman whose husband is dying yet every day they get on their bicycle built for two. With her in the front, they journey along. When he tires, when he needs to stop pedalling and close his eyes for awhile, she pedals on. She pedals them on through bustling city streets out into the quiet of the countryside. She pedals on through an unrelenting fatigue as she faces the army of his illness.   As he sleeps, she pedals them deeper into the comforting country air that gently lifts his hair. She pedals on through tears, passing fields of memories and wonderings of what will come. She pedals on away from the impending sense of aloneness that follows her around. She pedals on knowing that very soon he will drift away… She pedals because her boundless love for this man compels her to go on.  

If you happen to see her or know her, or you are her, please salute her.

Carrie

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The Broken Road

Friday, April 16th, 2010

When I was 30 I went through a breakup. It was characteristic of most breakups: empty spaces, a lurching of my world, the unbearable stillness that settles in when someone leaves. The dread. The bad hair. Fighting against the “he is all I need” conspiracy controlling my thoughts. Awful feeling of grief gently lulled along a river of tears….

My reply to the heartbreak was a decision to move from Vancouver BC back to Vancouver Island BC. I didn’t need six months of therapy. I just needed to move. To redefine my life. I didn’t have a voice inside saying “yes absolutely moving is the right thing to do.” It wasn’t like that. It didn’t carry the comfort of an absolute. Rather it was more of a gentle tugging, a small little hand hailing to me from my homeland. It was a risk. I was unsure. However, it turned out to be the right and best decision.

Back surrounded by loving family, the freshness of the ocean, the cool comforting presence of old growth trees, the quiet of rustic gardens and many cups of tea with my mom, I wrote a book. Out of the blue, for the next 8 months, for the first time in my life, I wrote. I wrote my heart out. Exercise your Ex is not what its title implies. It is not about badgering your ex out of your soul or your memory or your life. It’s about identifying the covert ways your pain works to keep you from moving on. 

Even though the book cover no longer has an image as the rights I purchased from Getty Images have long expired, and even though I would write it differently today, the book stands, for me, as a testimony as a monument actually, that I risked redefining my life.   

Those redefining moments: moving to the island, writing, fixing my hair again, and surrounding myself with family formed a bright constellation. A group of shining stars that led me over the years and lit my way through many more valleys, to a brand new kind of moment. A moment on Jan 22 of this year when I danced with my husband to our wedding song “God bless the broken road.”  And today looking back, I do bless the broken road. The breakups, the empty spaces, the fear, the challenges and most of all I bless whatever it was inside of me that just knew it was time to redefine.  

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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Look for the Bright Spots.

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Rather than focusing on what the problem is, or trying to understand the problem or concentrating on finding a solution to your problem, in their newest book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Dan and Chip Heath talk about doing the opposite.  They propose that we find a “bright spot and clone it.” The idea is to discover what is working well within a situation and duplicate it.

An inspiring example, that I loved which Dan and Chip provide, was how NGO employee Jerry Sternin made a tremendous difference in alleviating the malnourishment of Vietnamese children. Sternin was given just six months by the country’s government to turn things around. Sternin was very aware of the sources of the problem: a lack of sanitation, poverty, and unclean water. He also knew that diving into and attempting to change the root causes would be useless with just six months and no funding.  Instead Jerry Sternin set out to find the “bright spots” in the community. 

He struck gold. He indeed discovered children who were thriving in the exact same conditions others were perishing. Sternin identified what their “bright spot” mothers were doing differently: dividing two meals a day into four and adding sweet potato greens to the meals.  Small and extremely accessible changes were making the difference between life and death.

I think the idea of switching from “how do I solve this problem” to finding a bright spot and cloning it, is applicable to all part of our lives: work, relationship, parenting, school, creativity. Let’s all look for the “sweet potato greens” and clone them. Thank you Dan and Chip. And hats off to Jerry Sternin for your eye for “bright spots.”

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

 

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If you must fight, fight fair.

Monday, September 21st, 2009

We search the planet for that very special person to love and create a life with. We are often hard pressed, at times in excruciating ways, to find the calibre of connection we seek.  Yet despite the universe answering our call with the delivery of such love, how often do we manage to fight on behalf of our relationships? 

Without warning a storm rolls in and there you are hollering in the face of the very love you swore you would die for.  Against all odds you found each other, yet you allow unfounded accusations and hurtful verbal assailants to become the forces that divide you.

Of course we are going to disagree and be upset with one another. At times your ego will be bruised or your hurt will want to retaliate, but find the strength within yourself to leave out all the reacting that is divisive: incriminating each other, accusing, or simply being unfair or unkind.

Stand up for your love rather than for righteousness.  Only you can protect the purity of your relationship when forces threaten to weaken your bond. If love isn’t handled with extreme care how will it survive?

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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Together-alone.

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

I’m reading from A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She is talking about the different forms our relationships take over time. Lindbergh describes the early stage of a relationship as “pure, simple and unencumbered. It is like the artist’s vision before he has to discipline in into a form. The relationship is free of ties, claims, and responsibilities,” it is unburdened by worries about the future. “There are no others in this perfect unity.”  The relationship is “pure and excludes the rest of life.”

As we move on together further into a relationship, life encroaches more and more into our bed of bliss. That all absorbing together-alone time is now fleeting as we’ve let the rest of life in. Lindbergh claims that overtime our personal connection with each other is replaced by functioning. Perhaps this is why some people choose an affair – they are looking for their identity that disappeared in the abyss of functioning together.  They believe a fresh start -  re-experiencing that pure relationship with someone else is necessary in order to find or feel themselves again.  Of course it is easy to find one’s identity inside such a pure relationship because it is untouched by career, kids, responsibilities, and watching him take out the trash. But the purity doesn’t last.

We may have moments of living the purity of our relationship - of what brought us together in the first place – but it is not continuous. Finding ways to be with each other and re-experience and recapture the essence that is the two of you, is essential as life disciplines your relationship into form. Protect the purity – have breakfast alone without the kids or your iPhone. Leave the laundry and go sit under the moon. Look for opportunities to steal personal moments with each other everyday. Avoid overly functioning like you would thirsting in the desert.

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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Life Gets Easier.

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

Last night my Aunt Donna gave a speech. She said “being vulnerable makes life easier.” So very true. Yet many people refuse to be vulnerable at all costs. Let me clarify what I mean by being vulnerable. Let’s use this example: your husband says something like “you don’t have to sound so harsh about it.”

You say “I’m not being harsh. If you hadn’t done xyz or done abc I wouldn’t be so mad.”

 He says “I did do abc you just …..” And so it continues. Rather than blaming each other, it would be a million times easier to say “oh yeah that did sound harsh, or I’m sorry I’m not meaning to sound harsh, or I’m angry and will try to leave the harshness out of it.”

Being vulnerable is about self awareness. It is about spotting yourself in the moment and saying what you see. “I’m blaming you and that’s not helpful. I’m trying to make you wrong because I am very uncomfortable with what happened.” “Your right I didn’t do ….” 

We put endless energy into defending ourselves rather than just speaking the truth about what we are up to in the moment. I think we resist speaking the truth about our behavior because we’ve judged it as bad or negative. Or we believe it isn’t safe to own up to ourselves. Or we become defiant wanting the other person to go first.

When two people stop defending themselves and start acknowledging their humaness life gets a whole lot easier.  The layers of confusing arguing, the blaming, the hurtful accusations are disarmed. In my experience, when  you speak the truth about yourself, others will pick up on your heart  – an entirely different experience from having someone pick up on your blame.

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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You are capable.

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

 

You are fully capable of being with all that you are currently facing. Being with it without trying to control, or change others. Being with it without blame or resentment. Being with it without hurting yourself.

 

Whether or not you are capable isn’t in question. The question is do you want to live up to your capability and move beyond the struggle? What will it take – what do you need to do differently, starting today?

 

If you are not sure, say so and we will explore it together.

 

Carrie

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How are you doing after reading Act Like a Lady Think Like a Man?

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

In his bestselling book, Act like a lady think like a man, author Steve Harvey declares “if the special person in your life is not professing his love, not providing for you or protecting you, then he does not love you.”

“Providing:  Whatever his economic structure is, he provides for you and he will give you whatever he can.

Professing:  He will profess. If you have been dating a guy for six months, he has a title for you. If after six months, he is still calling you a friend, he has no plans for you. It doesn’t take us six months to figure out if you are the one. We are just not that difficult. We are simple people.

Protecting:  He will let nothing happen to you within his means.”

Men might be simple as Harvey depicts but relationships certainly are not. They are complex, convoluted affairs.  Remember Harvey isn’t a relationship expert, he is claiming to be an expert on manhood. The most important move a woman can make after reading his book is to circle back to herself, to the place where she is the expert.  The question isn’t does my relationship fit the 3 P’s or the documentation of true love Harvey shoots from the hip, but rather am I willing and wanting to stay with “what is” for now?

 

Harvey claims if your man is not calling you girlfriend he doesn’t love you. This is alarming. Where do we go with this information? Like most other issues, again, I think the only place to go is to come back to ourselves. For example, when we need to be called “girlfriend” we are looking to our man to define the status of our relationship. Coming back to ourselves would be to define the relationship based on what we are feeling and believing in. You love him, you’re committed, you’ve decided to stay and see what happens – that’s definition from the inside. That’s being a self possessed woman – living by your own standards and discernment. Not his. When we make choices based on the cues from the inside we are empowered and free. We aren’t hinging our life or choices on how someone else shows up. If you believe in your relationship and if you love him and want to love him, then show up and love him and let go of what he calls you. If at some point continuing to do so is not self respecting (and you’ll know when it’s not) or you realize that the relationship just isn’t going to manifest what you want, then make a different choice at that time.

 

Carrie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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