I was listening to a speaker tell a group of people that no one should ever underestimate the impact that we have upon each other’s lives. No one should ever underestimate their influence nor should they underestimate their presence or their absence. We are all uniquely important to each other. While our levels of intimacy may vary with acquaintances or friends or lovers, the value of certain people are absolutely irreplaceable.
This means we have value; hence, our worth is more important than we think.
(Yours included!)
Due to the unnatural and the unexpected crimes that we find when people come in or out of our lives, this information is so strong and so moving because as we move through this world and navigate through good times and bad, we are social and interconnected for a purpose and a reason. Nothing in the world can ever replace this.
Nothing can replace your value nor can anything recreate your smile or your laugh and the impact this has on the world around you.
I know this.
Now, of course, I write this to include you. However, I write this to include myself too because I am like you. I need warmth for the hand. I need to smile. I need to laugh. I need to feel the interaction of mutual and reciprocal love which is unending when it’s done the right way.
There are no explanations which can make sense of our fallings-out or the changes we experience in life. Put simply, it is often said that people grow and move in different directions. We grow apart. We move towards this great cosmic idea or expression which we all know as fate. In this vast or infinite mystery, I know there is a reason and a purpose, as well as an answer, extraordinary as ever. And in conclusion, I believe that healing takes place for those who look to heal and yes, there is pain for those who look to keep the pain warm.
We categorize ourselves. We section ourselves in different ways and compartmentalize our memories and our experiences. We keep these things close and kept like a diary; we grow and we live. We feel and we endure. And as we make our way, hopefully, we learn a little.
Hopefully, we live a little.
I hope that we love a little and, at best, we laugh a little harder each day.
I agree that we are all equally important. I agree that while times are not always simple, there is relevance to our existence. Certainly, there is a defined importance and, more specifically, there is a definite impact that we have on each other’s lives. No matter what.
It is often misunderstood that our presence has value. It is equally misunderstood that our absence and the void we leave behind, should we pick up and go for whatever the reason may be – that most certainty, we leave behind an unfillable space, or an empty atmosphere, a hole, a pit of melancholy, and a vacant abyss that is unfixable or unrestorable to someone; because to them, we have an infinite value which is also called love.
People run from this. As beautiful and pure as this is and childlike with its gentle sense of loftiness, people avoid this because it is too brave and too daring to be this in love or free.
On the opposite end, perhaps it’s not the freedom that scares us so much, it’s the touch of heaven and then the crash back to Earth when the Heavens vanish.
Ever since the age of 19 or so –
I have had dreams where I found myself in a field atop of an Upstate, New York mountain. I love it here because I am far from the typical man-made nonsense and the Midtown drama of mindless pedestrians who mind their cell phones instead of the heavy foot traffic around them. I am nowhere near the mad, Kamikaze taxi cabs with death-wish drivers, eager for their next fare, and so mad and aggressive.
This place in the mountains is a real place. I’ve been here before although, my dream takes on a different shape which alters the landscape at times; and me, I am still young in a sense, yet I am older in this dream as if to be a man who returns to the scene of a youthful crime. I return to a scene which happened decades ago where a theft of services took place.
I view this place with a special allegiance.
This is far from “the life” I know around me and far from the undisputed craziness of bickering and fights or the back-and-forth nonsense where no one wins; but more, our interconnected life only changes hands between captors and the voluntary hostage (or vice-versa) to which one person can breathe out so that someone else can breathe in.
I see this as the codependent tides of back-and-forth lives, interdependent upon our defects, to keep us rationalized as to why we never dare to change and to make sense of our social sickness. Better yet, this explains why people never leave or walk away, because we stick to a poison that we know.
But please . . .
I don’t want to digress.
I view this mountain top as more than a proverbial Mecca or place of spiritual birth.
(Or growth)
It’s here in this vision and here at this place of healing that I go back to a time of slight reprieve. I go back to a return and to a soft moment during an otherwise hard time.
Yet, amidst the chaos and weight of fear or indecision, there was this place which is real and also significant to me at one point in my life. This mountain, or this so-called Mecca; or this place of reprieve and healing is a gateway to a moment in time where I chose to split from one form of existence and entered into another.
This is both a birthplace and a death place and both with an equal appeal to the heart.
I find this place as a reoccurring dream which comes to me at different times to reveal different periods of emotion. Better yet, I see this as a lance to pierce the flesh of an unwanted boil in the flesh of my heart; and where, at last, I can remove the unwanted sediments or the puss. Yes, I’ll bleed, but at last, I can heal.
It is clear to me and certainly noteworthy that while no one talks about this or the importance of our belonging to each other, it is often easy to overlook the simplest things, like noticing the time on the clock at 9:09 each morning, or seeing a place by a subway station, or remembering a doorway that someone used to walk through.
It is impossible to recreate a relationship. However, it is not impossible to heal or recover. While I offer this with no excuses or apologies, I present these thoughts as lovingly and as personally as I can; raw as ever, heartfelt and from deep within my soul. Hence, I’ll go on from here.
Sweet as syrup or fresh like fruit from the vine.
Or, as sweet as I can be –
It is impossible to forget the value of a person. At times, it might also be impossible to forget the wounds in our hearts; but yes, life comes with rights.
To each is the right to adapt, to heal and to improve their life on a daily basis.
It is so crucial, the word love.
It is essential to live, love, laugh and learn. It is beyond measure to reach someone and touch them so delicately and intimately that nothing else in the world could come close to the spark they ignite.
There are no words that could inspire a touch like this, just by a memory, or the thought of someone’s laugh.
It’s strange to me because no one seems to know that everyone has this great appeal.
No one seems to know their own irreplaceable value.
No one knows how important they are to someone else unless, of course, their absence is found.
Yet we live some and we learn some and we love some and sadly, we lose some.
This is life.
This is absolutely true.
However, the daringness to love is equal to our zest to live.
This is our drive that keeps us alive. This is our heart which has the right to sing out, almost childlike as if to run down the streets, like back when we were kids, and running in celebration or to scream from a rooftop, or in the case of my dream; to scream from a mountaintop and to redefine this Mecca of my heart.
Let no one take so much importance that they take you away from yourself; but at the same time, never allow yourself to be taken away from your love.
Never allow yourself the denial of your truest freedom.
Never retreat or surrender this because this is the most beautiful thing we own on this Earth – the right to love and the right to be loved in return.
Nothing else carries a wealth like this.
Last night, I had that dream again, upon the mountaintop.
It is beautiful here, although I am alone. I was a child again, yet I am no child at all.
I was recognizing my whereabouts and realizing that I have again come back to my Mecca and birthplace, which is also a death place.
I was here because more than the rebirth of my sanity, I want to restore myself to empower me and encourage the rebirth of the rest of my life.
If the fates should restore me and should I find myself at freedom’s gate with love in my heart, and should I be allowed the promise of forever and after, then I will above all things, honor this, myself and the love I have in a more than fair and mutual distribution.
Now, I understand that this is not typical.
This is not “tough” so-to-speak.
But I’ve not been tough for a very long time.
I understand that perhaps my outpouring message sounds a bit too much like a hopeless romantic and a bleeding heart, which I am and yes, my heart bleeds.
It has taken me decades to claim this and since this is my journal and my story; and since I am the narrator in this adventure, I have the right to dictate the fashion of this event.
I have the right to cry.
I have the right to laugh. I have the right to enjoy my life, even if I find myself in unenjoyable times or with lonesome moments, almost like a sad or dungeon-like basement appeal where there’s boxes of old keep-sakes, which appear to have lost their meanings; but still, in this version of inward-reflection of loss, it is not permissible to remain unloved or unwanted or in this so-called basement-like dungeon, unattached in this world I so desperately want to touch.
So whether the fates bring us to where we thought we wanted to be; at last, someday, our fates will unavoidably bring us to where we are supposed to be –
healed, happy, improved and destined to reach our greatest plateau of all –
Love
Never assume your love means nothing.
Trust me.
Love means everything –
It’s just that well . . .
People lack the understanding of how impactful they are.
(Myself included)
They misuse their fears in a sense that rather than allow this to motivate change; instead, people build walls instead of bridges.
We turn inward or resentful.
We build unhealthy boundaries and become inflexible and too rigid.
More importantly, we grow too tired and weak and weary because the battle for protection can be long and hard.
With no Mecca or a place of reprieve, the soldier within us is alone, without warmth, wounded and unaligned with peace.
Peace –
What a great word this is.
Never underestimate the peace you bring to me because without you, the absence is not just chaotic – it’s heartbreaking.
Believe me.
The Written Addiction 