Unlatched

All we have is our perception. We have only insight into our own feelings, thoughts and the 'why' behind our own actions. I know what I feel and with the best of my ability I attempt to understand the environment around me; the circumstances I face, the decisions I make and and how I interact with the people around me.

Unfortunately sometimes, that perception is not accurate and it collides with the cold hard reality of what is actually going on around us. I am beginning to believe that this is the only true adversity we ever face in life; the reconciliation of what we assumed and the actuality of what is.

This year started off with a wonderful relationship that blind sided me. Like the fan who caught the home run ball, he sits there running his fingers over the stitches and where the ball was scuffed up from contact with the bat. Out of all the tens of thousands of fans in the stands, he had this one in a million chance to catch this ball and it is his alone to show and for all to envy. Sometimes, that home run ball is hit by the away team and against your own wishes, it beckons to be thrown back on the field.

My perception was that I truly captured something special and the reality is that what I thought was wrong. The healing process begins for me, yet again.

Reflecting back- when my marriage turned to separation almost two years ago I was determined to learn something from it. I was successful; I extracted some truths about myself that pained me to accept but I found that process necessary. I have learned so much about what our perception of the end a relationship should be versus the reality of what it needs to be. Learn to leave the regret behind and leverage the experience in an honest fashion to learn something from it and do not make that same mistake again.

My lesson in this? No matter how intense the emotions are, how perfectly the puzzle pieces seem to fit, how strong the butterflies flutter and how many great things come from the time spent together you cannot be greedy. Patience and moderation yield an organic level of consistency. Excess and haste yield an unnatural and unsustainable pace. Embrace turns to suffocation and desires spoil to indulgence.

We are emotional beings; sometimes we move towards pleasure and other times we move from pain. The pace in which we do so sets the tone for everything in our life. Marcus Mumford said it best with his lyric "And I will love with urgency but not with haste." and I knew that to be a truth. I allowed the pleasure of my feelings to serve as a catalyst to the pace at which I was pursuant to.

Easily there are things for me to learn here. I'll pick up the pieces, acknowledge the ones that are a part of me that I am not happy with, accept them and learn from them. I also take with me the fact that one of my faults was that I loved too much. You see, every other time I did it wrong. I allowed some lack of effort on my part to ruin everything. This time, I did it right. The effort was dominantly present. I will learn from this but I will walk away with a genuine smile on my face because of the manner in which I walked into it.