The Love Game, The Wake Up Game, Are they the Same

The love game
The wake up game
ARE THEY THE SAME?

You know, around here, if you've read enough of my blogs, that this is a rhetorical question.

And it's a rhetorical question worth examining for awhile.

Because love is big.
It has kisses.
It has affection.
It has caring for.
It has all sorts of old wounds and junk coming up.
It has chanced to grow up.
It has touch.
It has sex.
It has all sorts of chances to heal old wounds and old junk coming up.

(This isn't a poem.
This is an essay being written out more or less line by line to make the possibilities more obvious, to make the richness more clear.
Maybe it makes it easy to understand.
I hope so.)

Love is very much this strange feeling of connection and caring and being willing to DO for the other person. Let's leave aside all the hooey about co-dependence and simply hone in on the kind of love like a parent has for their child.

They want what's best for the child.
If the child is normal, sometimes they drive the parent a little or a lot crazy.
If the parent is good enough, they get riled by that, and then let it go.
They over all are putting their energy into wanting what's best for the child.

Unless this relationship gets stuck
as often happens with teenagers
in power struggles.

Power struggles.
Who gets to say who does what when?
Ugh.

And let's expand that out to a couple.

We love our mate.
They drive us a little or a lot crazy sometimes.
We get riled, or maybe not, and then we go back to wanting what's best for them.
We, really, when love is what it should be, a force for unity and expansion, want what's best for the WE, the US, that is being created.

This is cool.
This is exhausting.
This goes against the me me me grain of either,
the ego
our capitalist society
our insecurities.

And so what?

Love is being uncomfortable for the sake of another.
Not as a masochist.
Not as a doormat.
But as someone who is willing to hang in there with the mess of life.
We are not the same person.
We feel unity
Sometimes.
We want to be closer and more loving
Sometimes

and that is going to require backing off from the
two traps of ruined or struggling relationships;

The "I am right, you are wrong" trap
and
the Do it My Way, and Do it when I say so.

Control.
Righteousness.

Ah, what a fine mess we can get into with another person.

And here's were the rhetorical question's answer comes to our rescue.

If love is a wake up game,
we can wake up to our wish to be right,
we can wake up to our agitation in the present,
we can wake up to our wish to run the show to make the agitation for away,
or
we can wake up to our wish to run away to avoid the agitation
and
we can wake up to our wish to blaming the other person for our buttons having been pushed
and
we can wake up to our love, in the moment, when we feel and see and hear the other person without our story

ah:
back to Byron Katie land, in a way:

Who we really are
is who we are in the present without our story blocking the way

And,
it is only our real self that can love

that is why it feels so good.
We are being what we are meant to be.

This is good.
We are good.
The other is good.

We push each other's buttons.
We stay present.

Life is good.
Love's problems are stepping stones to a quick route to enlightenment.

Really?
It could be.
It just might be.

Try it and see.

Only your experience of your present moment by moment can guide you to what is real.
With good fortune, you'll have love's messes as the motivating elixir to speed you back into this present moment.


And when we aren't there: we suffer.

Again, don't take my word for it.
Discover, feel, sense this on your own.

Good.