203. My suffering for a partner led to freedom and this blog, written to point you to freedom and peace also

I started writing about mature dating because of my own dating experiences after my second wife died. I was lonely and I really missed the companionship, warmth, and love of a woman. I wanted another partnership. Now, more than 12 years later, I’m surprised I still don’t have a committed partnership. But I no longer suffer. Life is happy just the way it is.

Along the way I’ve learned so much more than I knew was possible to learn. Actually, I didn’t learn, as much as I saw, the world for what it is, simplicity itself. As I dated in the early years I was also on a deep and committed spiritual search, a search to learn who I was, looking for a way to alleviate my suffering. That search took me, finally, into the realization that my pain wasn’t coming from the lack of a partner. It was coming from my inability to see life just as it is. Seeing that, I naturally wanted to share it – and this blog was born after some years of note-taking based on my experiences. I had seen many others hurting from the same thing I had been hurting from – a belief in their thoughts about life rather than seeing life for what it is, just as it is.

Dating as a senior turned out to be a wonderful metaphor for all of life. I had been trying to find my happiness by getting the world to line up the way I wanted. Eventually I realized that’s not the way. If it had been people would have found happiness a long time ago by using sheer will power to make things go their way. Or we all would have used affirmations or the certainty that we create our own reality and we’d have done that – created our own reality.

But after years of living and years of struggling through motivation programs and self-help books and courses of all kinds I knew that didn’t work. Finally I saw that the answer is so elusive because it’s so simple. It was a matter of questioning my firmly-held beliefs to see if I actually knew what I thought I knew. It turns out I didn’t. Freedom and peace, to my surprise, came when I allowed deeper, intuitive answers to surface, and saw that I wasn’t in charge of my life and neither was anyone else. All I had to do was to realize the truth that I’m being lived and the power that lives as me and all of life is always at peace and living in harmony.

Argue with that and we hurt. See the truth of that and we simply live as awareness, peace, happiness, and love, watching life unfold. That, surprisingly, is who we’ve been all along. We just didn’t know, while all the time we thought we did. What a shock! What a gift!

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer