98. When your love is truly love, you’ll only say: “Come dance with me.”
I ran across two short poems recently by the 14th century Persian poet and mystic, Hafiz. They’re about love and acceptance. The first is: “Even after all this time the sun does not say to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky.”
The second one is shorter: “God only speak four words, ‘Come dance with me.’”
They reminded me of romantic relationships. Is what most of us call love really love? Is it really unconditional – totally accepting and nonjudgmental? What happens, for instance, when you say you love someone, yet erupt in a volatile flash in moments? Is that love in action? As mature daters we’ve had some years to get to know ourselves. Yet, for many, the proverbial stuff hits the fan when we get triggered by a partner. A casual date usually doesn’t light our fuse. We just walk away. But when there are real feelings we’re more vulnerable, thus more easily and quickly hurt. Unless we’re awake, that is.
It may seem that years of experience in living would have given us some wisdom and calm to keep our personal mountain from exploding. But a fiery flash can be set off pretty quickly when a supposedly mature (emotionally as well as in years) person’s buried, personal hurts are touched.
For example, if you were teased for being overweight as a kid, that might be a seriously sensitive topic for you. Even though you’ve slimmed down, if someone even mentions a word that vaguely suggests you’re fat – ka-boom!, you’re ready for a fight. We all know the defensive feelings when the hot wire of our egos is touched, usually innocently, by someone close to us or whose admiration we want.
A little investigation, however, could allow us to drop those sensitive ego-born defenses if we simply look to see what’s really happening. If you really want to get to the crux of a statement someone makes it simply consists of sounds coming from their mouths doesn’t it? The sounds are formed into words we and the speaker know.
But at this point we can cause ourselves pain or we can be at ease with life as it is. There are two questions here, it seems to me. One is this: Do we really know what our partner means when they use a word in a certain way? Do they mean what we would mean if we were using that word? Instead of being so quick to judge and condemn we could just see that we don’t know.
The second issue is that even if the speaker does mean what we think they mean, do we need to build defenses and get mad? Don’t they have the same right to their opinions as we do, even their opinions about us? Or, unlike the sun, do they “owe us” only what we want to hear. Who knows?, maybe what they’re saying is the most useful thing we could hear – something only a true friend would say. And if we choose to feel hurt it could mean we’re not very firm in our own self-acceptance. If we were, what would we need to defend?
When we stop putting our own meaning-labels on words, and when we stop deciding how life “should” be and start accepting it as it is, we might be a lot more calm. An open conversation might show that what we thought someone meant wasn’t even close to what they were really saying. Finally, we may realize that what we both want in a relationship is just the nonjudgmental ease of being to say, “Come dance with me.”
Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer
