@Hari 25 October 2020

How Do We Know if it's Right To Quit?

How do we know when it is right to leave our commitment? When it has become impossible to go on? When going on has lost its point? How we know? The answer is, If our hearts are right, we will know. Ah, our hearts, yes, but our hearts pull the wool over our eyes. We cannot count on our hearts; our hearts are sneaky things. And yet they are the best we have. So the important thing is to keep them tuned to caring. To begin with, we could change the mood of the question, make it more positive. Instead of asking how we know when we cannot keep our commitment any longer, we could ask how we know that we should keep on trying. One thing that helps is to get close to honest people who have faced up to and worked through tougher problems than ours, close enough so that we can see into their secrets for successful caring and coping. Its a little like knowing how to tell great art from fakery; if you look at real art often enough, you will see the difference, and your heart will not trick you. In the same way, if we know enough people who have learned to swim together through seas of trouble, we will have a better eye for hints of possibilities within our own troubled waters. But if we are to learn by looking at examples of the art of commitment keeping, we need people around us who will let us look into their lives and see the truth about them. We need to get inside a community of real people, honest people, who are willing to let us see how they struggled against the odds to keep their commitments. Who keep hope alive because they keep on caring enough to want to be hopeful. Or people too who were once defeated, divorced, and are now doing better at it the second time. Our hearts learn the truth from honest strugglers who dare to reveal their own struggles, including their failures as well as successes. I don't mean a group where people at their fortieth anniversary muse-in a fuzzy, nostalgic way-that it has not always been easy for them to achieve their graying bliss. I mean a group in which people dare to talk in the present tense, and say something like, "Jane and I are having a very devil of a time of it these days, and we're not sure we can stay together, but we don't want to quit trying, not yet. " I mean a community in which struggles dare to ask other strugglers how they are doing it. If we are going to help each other in the challenge of commitment keeping, we will have to risk being transparent to each other. The only people who were ever truly helpful to Che and me were the ones who let us see and feel the inside story of their struggles, including their defeats and their compromises, and how they turned commitment keeping into an adventure of imperfect, but caring, love. They helped us in two ways: and second, by letting us know that we were not alone in our efforts to turn commitment keeping into creative partnership. In short, one way to explore the possibilities that our situation is not as hopeless as we may think it is, in to get into a commitment keepers. An honest community. A transparent community. Only a community of transparent strugglers can keep our hearts honest when we wonder whether the time has come to fold our cards and walk away from commitment. A simple summary of this chapter will do: commitment to marriage is meant to be forever, but what is meant to be cannot always be. Not in the real world of weak and needy and faulty folk. Unconditional commitments can be undone by incurable conditions. We weave the tapestry of out commitments with the threads of our wobbly wills. And in this vale of vile winds, our most beautiful tapestries can be torn to shreads. We are all flawed people trying to keep our commitments to flawed people. And sometimes it gets too much for some of us. The more reason, then, to remember that when we want to know where we are going, it helps to go back to where we began. Back to commitment-to the hopeful proposition that, with care, we may be able to make things better than they are, good enough to up with, at least, and maybe even good enough to translate the rigors of commitment into a modest harvest of happiness. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing