I’m heading off with my husband for a trip to celebrate our 25th anniversary that was canceled and rescheduled from last October.  I have to admit, after such a trying and stressful year, I’m extra happy to celebrate the success of making it to not only our 25th, but to our 26th!  Like many, the isolation and stresses of the past year were a challenge to our relationship.  I wasn’t always the person I wanted to be and certainly did not feel love in the way I wanted, both in giving and receiving it. And so with your indulgence I wanted to share some of my reflections on the truth about “real life love” in the hopes that I can better understand it and with the extra hope that some people may relate as well.

There is the Bible verse (Corinthians 13:4-8) recited at so many weddings that always comes to mind when I think about marriage…”Love is patient, love is kind…”  and how I should be.  But the reality is that I am not patient and not kind, at least a lot of the time.  On good days when I feel balanced and our lives feel under control, I can be very patient and very kind.  But most of the time I’m stressed to some degree, whether by external things or internal insecurities.  How patient and how kind I feel capable of tends to be in direct proportion to these other matters and how well I’m doing with them.  

Love itself is amazing.  When I can focus on it as a pure state, just as the slogans say, it is powerful and all I need.  It’s an energy like nothing else I can ever experience and makes me a better person.  It truly does fill my heart and puts me in a state of awe.  It guides me to make good choices and to put others before myself in a way that provides meaning and purpose to my life. It fills me up with gratitude and feels a little like magic, something that is beyond explanation and reason and provides a sense of “wow” to our existence.  When I’m able to stay connected to this energy, I feel as if I’m operating on another plane of existence – for me, it is a spiritual sense of connection.

But, then there’s all that I let get in the way of this.  Especially this past year, in working from home, I felt isolated and insecure.  I was worried about money and my job, people’s health and our daughter’s schooling and socializing, the state of our country and the state of the world.  With so much time by myself working from home, I started to overthink everything.  At the same time, my poor husband was trying to keep his business open and his employees working.  He was going in each day and riding waves of the unknown trying to keep things running, applying for business loans and dealing with ever changing potential crises. The counterpoint of our two experiences led me to feel lonely and “needy,” at just the time he was preoccupied and overwhelmed.  It led to tensions and hurt feelings.  While it was neither of our fault, we were both just doing the best we could in unusual circumstances, it still felt so damn personal.

And this is what I think gets in the way of love.  We are people full of fears, needs, and insecurities who long to be seen and appreciated.  Yet, we all have baggage from the family we grew up with and our old relationships. Pair this up with another human being with bags loaded down with fears, needs, and insecurities, and you’ve got a recipe for a messy conundrum – who’s perception is correct, whose need takes priority, who started it and who will apologize?  There is so much potential for conflict, it’s actually a miracle that relationships genuinely work as well as they do as much of the time as they do!

So, I guess what stands out to me is that, yes, “love is patient and love is kind”, but we, as people, are not.  And in order to make a relationship work, we have to be active in removing  the burdens that get in the way of the love that is.  But it ain’t easy.  It takes a lot of self awareness and humility, negotiating and compromising, balancing taking care of ourselves and one another.  In other words, we each must own what’s in our bags and see how it affects the relationship. And as I pack my bag for our anniversary trip, I most certainly need to keep in mind that someone else will also be there to carry it.  And this is both the beauty and the challenge of traveling life’s journey together.

Thanks to my husband of 26 years who is in fact kind, loyal, smart as heck, and funny.  He had no idea what he was getting into marrying a psychologist and, as he says, learning about all the “issues” one can have.  I am grateful for his wisdom, character, resilience and perspective that has indeed been a gift and a blessing.  And luckily for me, he’s been strong enough to help shoulder my bag through the troubled times when I could not.

This past week brought the intersection of two events for me.  One was the Jewish New Year, a holiday when we’re encouraged to reflect on our previous year and make commitments to do better in the year ahead.  The other was a trip to spend time with my brother and his family, who I had not seen for over two years due to Covid.  The combination of these two profound experiences got me thinking about how clear we can see our priorities when we have the time to think about them, but how very hard it is to keep them in our focus in the day to day.

To be honest, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this, I’m always surprised by how many of my Jewish New Year vows to do better are similar to the ones I made the year before.  “Really?  Am I really working on that same thing again?”  But the answer is usually “yes, yes I am.”  For a while I’m good at being aware and motivated to make my changes.  I journal about it and notice it in my day to day.  But over time, without fail, it tends to slip into the background, until it seems like I rediscover it all over again as a new awareness that’s merely a recycle of the old ones.  

In seeing my brother after so long, it reminded me of the lessons I discovered during the pandemic about the value of time with my family, of slowing down and focusing on what really mattered to me, of voting and protesting, of noticing the effects of income inequality and climate change. But with the frustration of the effects of the delta variant and the eagerness for life to get back to “normal” again, I fear I’m already forgetting what seemed like the life changing lessons I’d learned. So much was taken away from us so suddenly, the silver lining in it all was a chance to see what really mattered. But the silver lining is already fading into the background and I’m afraid I’m losing the clarity in vision that was provided by the terrible events of a deadly pandemic.

I recently read an article by the writer Julio Vincent Gambuto on Medium that echoed my concern and really inspired me.  Apparently I’m very late to the game, as 20 million readers made his article viral back in 2020, which he followed up with two other thoughtful articles in response.  In his first article, Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting, Gambuto coins the term “The Great Pause” and describes it as an amazing gift given to us all.  He writes:  What the crisis has given us is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views.  At no other time, ever in our history, have we gotten the opportunity to see what would happen if the world simply stopped.  Here it is.  We’re in it.  Stores are closed.  Restaurants are empty.  Streets and six lane highways are barren.  Even the planet itself is rattling less (true story).  And because it is rarer than rare, it has brought to light all of the beautiful and painful truths of how we live.  Gambuto reflects on the goodness of people, helping each other, caring for eachother, standing in long lines to vote, protesting the effects of systemic racism and the effects of inadequate health care for all.  He describes the Great Pause as a vision of the possibilities that were revealed to us when we have the benefit of time.  And what he warns against is not only losing the view we were gifted as we go back to our busy lives, but even worse, the political and corporate efforts that will go to great lengths to not only distract us from our new truths, but seek to make us forget.

It is comforting to go back to normal.  The truths revealed during the last year were disturbing and took our time and our attention into uncomfortable places.  But just like the Jewish New Year offers me an opportunity each year to reset and refocus on my intended values, I hope we all can find a way to hold on to the profound revelations gained from a traumatic year.  Gambuto implores us to recast ourselves as citizens, not just consumers.  He advises us to think deeply about what we do with our time and our money.  What we click on, what we purchase, what we watch, all has reverberations for our culture and our personal lives.  He invites us to carefully choose what we put back in our lives.  It is our chance to define a new version of normal, “a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud.”  

Perhaps we can each consider a way to schedule A Great Pause on a regular basis.  For me, the Jewish New Year is an annual time out to consider these truths.  But what if I did more than just reflect.  What if I unsubscribed from all my automatic emails and advertising and carefully chose which ones to re-engage with.  What if I reviewed my calendar and more carefully scheduled what reflected my values in how I use my time.  Perhaps I could be a better more empowered consumer and citizen by paying more attention to what I allow myself to be pulled into.  There is a great desire for our attention.  It is, in fact, a commodity sold to companies and political movements.  What if I made them more accountable for their content and required them to be more truthful in their reporting, less divisive in their rhetoric, and more accountable to their environmental impact?  We, as citizens have this power.  In fact, the truth is, I don’t even need A Great Pause, just a few second pause, to make better choices each and every day.  I just need to remember not to forget.