When You Risk Sharing Your Best...
You are practicing bravery and learning to trust yourself.
When you bravely reach way, deep inside and take out some of what you consider your very best, hoping those you risk showing will see and understand, both gesture and inherent risk, and maybe glimpse some deeper essence of who you really are… you are practicing bravery. You are teaching yourself to stand in the hot light of being truly seen. This is immense work and cannot be undertaken absent immense vulnerability.
And when this brave gesture on your part falls upon deaf ears or blind eyes, when those you reveal yourself to either cannot fathom what you’re getting on about or are simply too self-absorbed (…or stingy), to bother seeing that sacred wisp of smoke and flame, that magic you’ve been tending, but holding back so that others wouldn’t blow it out… When they do see it but simply refuse to acknowledge it, then, as weird and cruel as it may seem, they have offered you a profound, if somewhat painful gift.
You risked offering them what you have not offered others, some closely held reserve of your very best, most sacred you. That was your part of the deal, that was you honoring the very idea of relationship. That was the part you alone can control.
The rest, …you cannot.
So if/when that vulnerability and what you offer simply does not call out to them or move them, or when they intentionally withhold any sort of kindness in response, you are free then, finally to see them more clearly too, their values and perhaps their stinginess, their willingness to pretend not to see, to withhold. And with that, you may finally know every essential thing you need to know about them.
And then it is so much easier to decide whether the little they can see, or the pittance they will offer you is enough to keep you fascinated by what you had hoped of them, believed of them, enough to keep you standing there, heart in hand, being deliberately looked past or simply not noticed, not valued. You are free to see them, not as they pretend to be or as you have wished them to be, but as they are, and free to weigh the risks, on true friendship’s behalf, accordingly.
Free to choose for something better. Or nothing at all.
Love is caring and kind. It sees the best in others and offers its best in response. Withholding or ignoring, deliberately making someone feel smaller,
…that is not love.
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I am finding that writing through tears--and I don't mean this in a poor/poor me way, only that sometimes I will look at what I've written and feel every step of the path it took to arrive at that page, seeing what a knife edge that path is and how hard it can be to balance upon it--is like looking out from the inside of a bubble, and the view is quite honestly, beautiful, and one I wouldn't have seen otherwise. This is the shock for me David, when you or other kind readers and writers share your thoughts on my writing: like oh! they've found their way inside here too. I am grateful for you David.
The dandelions keep blooming, even as they’re mowed and slighted and ignored. But look at how the horizon glows!
Bless you and your gentle offerings. 🙏