The Small Thing

It's a pretty big thing to be in control: we spend half our lives learning how to achieve it and the next half learning how to balance control with decency.

It's a pretty small thing: you give up trying to control everything and everyone else.

Of course, attaining that level of maturity calls for accomplishing the top -- the mountain of courtesy with its steep and backsliding slopes. This is a trifle more interesting to the student of eternal relations, and calls for development of the ability to distinguish between oneself and another, the others.

Here's the short course: Lust runs out in equal proportion to Love running in. This is one of the reasons why so many men and women have acceded to the excuse that they are afflicted with an "addiction to sex" -- because they are stuck at level one (gaining control), but are in defiance of its terms, control meaning something, as in "self-...." Instead, they are suffering a distraction from what life really has to offer in favor of an illusion: that there is a next, a better, the best thrill -- usually defined within the word "orgasm." This gets sticky. The lesson is that while orgasm may be thrilling and confirming it is not what is restorative, what heals the human breast. That is the permanency of the connection and especially the shared confidence of it. Trust. Infidelity is the obserse and opposite, though the coin may remain the same.

The small thing to be sought after in this haystack is an ability that runs counter to what seems to be in one's best interest as a human beast: surrender. Sometimes one achieves it out of exhaustion in the search for the unknown, the unrealized. Yet, usually, surrender appears as but a dim possiblity only after the the spun gold of a relationship shows itself in the turret light of a new dawn.

You cannot hold it in the palm of your hand, you cannot contain it. You cannot explain it. You can only refuse it or give yourself up to it in confident surrender of control, this matter of finding Love.