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Today's
quotation:
Most
people enter into relationships with an eye toward what they can
get
out of them,
rather than what they can put into them. The purpose of a
relationship is to decide
what part of yourself you'd like to see "show up,"
not
what part of another you can
capture and hold. The purpose of a
relationship is not to
have another who might
complete you; but to have
another with whom you might share your
completeness.
Neale
Donald Walsch
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Today's
Meditation:
It took
me many years to understand relationships. This is
mostly because neither of my parents really knew anything
about relationships, and the more I learned about my
grandparents on both sides, the more I understood
why. It was simply ineptitude passed along from
generation to generation, and my parents passed on to me
all they knew, which wasn't really much at all. It
wasn't their fault, of course, and they themselves suffered greatly
from their lack of knowledge about relationships.
I
always thought that relationships were about fulfilling
needs, and finding someone else who would help you to do
so. Relationships were challenges that one had to
make happen, difficult things that leave people frustrated
and aggravated. But our relationships with others,
I've come to learn, are about what we can give to them,
what we can contribute to the lives of other people in our
lives. There are many things that I've learned in
life that I can share with others-- and there are many
things that they've learned that they can share with me.
Relationships
can't be all about giving, of course. The people
with whom we have relationships want to give to us, also,
and we have to be willing to receive as well; otherwise,
we're causing the relationship to be completely one-way,
something that isn't at all healthy. But we
shouldn't enter into relationships with the expectation of
simply receiving, or else we're establishing a completely
unfair dynamic going the other way.
How
we view our relationships is extremely important.
The expectations that we bring into our dealings with
other human beings go a long way towards determining the
health of those relationships, and if our expectation in
any relationship is solely to take, to fulfill our own
needs, then that relationship is doomed to be unhealthy,
and probably to fail eventually.
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