And it wasn't even something you said to me, but to one of your many readers, so eager to share their praise, insights, or sometime criticism with you.
We get waylaid, you and I, by the need to voice the obvious -- which has not seemed to dull with repetition, but to sharpen, rather.
Can a lover indeed benefit the beloved, as you opined recently -- without trying to change him or her?
I wondered -- even if the lover doesn't intend to change the subject of her or his affections, isn't that person altered anyway?
Sometimes love isn't even experienced as love.
As a parent, I have learned that what I can offer my older child right now feels to her like restraint instead of affection. To her, love is often measured in what I can give her, rather than in less material ways.
Yet I do believe that my proffer of boundaries and discipline will come to seem, when she is old enough to understand why, like a gift.
Whether it will change her or not, I am not sure.
And I also believe (although in this I may be a bit delusional) that love can heal.
Love that doesn't drink at the waters of Lethe, but acknowledges the wounds of the past. Love that is received by the beloved in the spirit in which it is meant. Love that doesn't seek to bind or constrain.
I see that to this enticing notion I have added some pretty difficult caveats.
To be human is to be challenged to practice love again and again, even when you feel bruised and terrified and cynical.
Those are all human emotions, too. We are muddled and oft un-analytical creatures, acting on emotions and ideas we don't really pause to understand.
But we are capable.
Back to you, my friend.
The territory of conversation you and I haven't covered stretches out before us, opening new vistas as far as the eye can see.
Like a butterfly, I chose to alight here today, in between the tasks that call me.
Thank you.
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