273. Did you know that desire is the source of any dating pain you feel?

In your dating life desire is the basis of all your emotional suffering. If you’re hurting in any way about dating it has to be because you want something or someone to be different. When we don’t get what we want we suffer – in the form of sadness, anger, jealousy, frustration, loneliness and more. I’m not talking about a simple preference, of course. I’m talking about a desire that says, “If only I had that I could be happy.”

Life, however, unfolds without our desires. It just shows up, always fresh and sparkling new every moment, offering unequaled surprises and beauty if we just stop and see it.

Usually, though, we’re too busy wanting and judging to just be with what is. “Being” seems too simple. "Being" is just doing the next obvious thing without interpreting it and without a desire to alter or modify it. You live in the truth then, the truth that you don’t need to know and can’t know what’s going to happen next. This morning, for instance, I was going to have a cup of tea and go out for my usual exercise walk. I opened the refrigerator – and there in the bottom was blueberry juice, running all over. I had put a frozen bag in to thaw and apparently it had a slit in it. What a surprise!

So instead of walking right away I spent the next half-hour cleaning up blueberry juice that had run all over. I had just thought I was going out immediately for a walk but what did I know? It’s that way with dating too. We think we know what’s going to happen or what should happen. And then we suffer when it’s not what we expected. Life gets much simpler when we realize that it is what it is. Life (or God, or Source, or Infinite Intelligence) is living us and everything else. Having a war with it gets you nothing but misery. “Being” with it as it is gets you joy and peace, and some surprisingly happy experiences.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer