No dream inspired by love is too big.  My dream, what stirs me, is when two people turn around, drop their focus on making life fit an ideal, walk head on into the real, raw truths of their lover, and experience the light of authentic love and compassion being born in their heart.  I have yet to articulate this in a way that comes close to capturing it, but it happened in the movie, Love and Other Drugs.

The movie reminded of a past love.  Our energies blended in heavenly ways.  I realized soon after we parted that I would need to make peace with the fact that I might never encounter another lover like him.  The explosive, consuming passion and tenderness, silence and synchrony created a deep bond, but our story did not end like the one in the movie.

As I followed the movie, which involved a passionate romance between a charming lady’s man and a woman with Parkinson’s, I saw that I’ve been hoping to inspire the birth of love in others while trying to protect them from my pains.  I wasn’t always successful, and when I failed, I failed horribly, but I held this shield over my pain and insisted no one ever allow themselves to be harmed by it.  I wasn’t afraid.  I simply did not want to cause suffering.

Yet, how can I open someone’s heart while struggling to need nothing from nobody?

There was this one afternoon last summer when I rendezvoused with my past love, and I dropped the shield.  He stayed present as my pain unfolded, holding and soothing me.  I cried so hard that my eyes nearly swelled shut.  He didn’t cringe or run away.  That afternoon was healing, but my skill at knowing when to hide and when to cry was poor.  When the pain is tied to the one from whom you seek comfort, things get complicated really fast.

Prior to seeing the movie, my former love, Jimmie, explained with great pains what a “burden” and a “misery” an unemployed mother of two would bring into someone’s life.  Every hour we spent together was nothing but pure pleasure.  Content, easy, mellow, and warm, we enjoyed each other’s company so much that the choice to move in different directions seemed non sequitur.  Along the way, however, I was under evaluation.  I make a poor business partner, and business ventures and strategies are Jimmie’s middle name.

When we look for a partner, he explained, the last thing we want is someone who will bring “agony and suffering” into our lives.

“Have I brought agony into your life?” I asked.  The answer was a sheepish, obvious no.  He puts a smile on my face, and I am more at peace with my circumstances than anyone.  The only burdens I brought into his life were the ones he took on himself.

Like the character in the movie who tried to find his girlfriend a cure, Jimmie went through a phase of trying to fix my circumstances.  Before I saw the movie, I realized that his vehement, obsessive attempt to alter my financial status overnight was driven by the fact that he was simultaneously in love with me and unable to fathom joining lives with a financially ruined single mother.  He spoke to a psychology professor at a university to find out if jobs were available.  He strategized, thinking out loud for hours on end, mapping out my life.  I sent him the trailer for the movie The Pursuit of Happyness and asked him to drop it.  There are periods in life when the old forms have dissolved, but the new forms have yet to congeal, and in that space, life can appear barren, threatening, and bleak, but it’s just an illusion.

“Consider the Rubik’s cube,” I said.  “You know how it’s easy to get one side, right?  But if you want to get them all, what’s the first thing that happens?”

“You mess up the side you got,” he said.

“I’m standing in the center of the Rubik’s cube, and I’m at peace.  I can see what’s happening here, and it’s all okay.  Things will come together.  And you’re standing on one side freaking out and waving your hands in the air trying to get me to see reason.”

But that was not the point.  I eventually won that argument, more than once.  But the point is that I agreed with him.  I do carry a heavy burden, and my belief is that if I let so much as one ounce of it encumber those I love, I would bring misery and agony and suffering into their lives, and that is the last thing I want.

But is it?

I wanted to tell Jimmie, “What would you do with a homeless person?  You want to make the world a better place, but what would you do with someone who was only making it worse?  Put them down?  What if the true purpose of the homeless person was to inspire compassion in others?”

I said these words in my mind without realizing how deeply I needed to get that lesson myself.  I want to make the world a better place, and I want to do that by relieving suffering, and what most relieves suffering is an open heart.  For that reason, I want to open hearts.  And I’ve been trying to do that by shielding people from the burdens of my life.

I still think my burdens are mine and mine alone, but if someone is stirred to share them with me, I think that will be beautiful.

This afternoon, a pipe broke in my house and flooded my bathrooms, including the entire carpet between them.  I called my mother, who knows the contact information of the landlord.  She came over with a carpet cleaner to suck up the puddles.  I warned her that I’d had less than four hours of sleep last night in order to complete my graduate thesis, and my boys had been inconsolable since they walked in the door.  I helped manage the mess, and after we were done, I lay down on the couch, aching and sleepy.  Seeing me recline, she was filled with rage and stormed out of the house, slamming the door on her way out.  This was not the first time.  Every time I need help, especially when I’m sick, she becomes angry.  When I was a teenager, if I experienced helplessness of any sort, she would scream and throw objects and demand that I get a handle on the situation.  One day, it was a drug reaction.  I took two medications before school that should not be taken together, and I ended up in the nurse’s office.  My mom picked me up from school furious, raced home, dragged me into my bedroom, found the bottles, and threw the pills into the sink.  I eventually ran away.  I moved to another state where I lived below the poverty line and worked two full time jobs until I raised the money to fly to California and begin college.

After the flooded floors, as my mom drove away, I found myself adopting her view, angry with myself at my inability to manage the situation.  I felt like a burden.  And yet, my efforts up until her arrival were superhuman.  There are times when we must stand on our own two feet and carry this life alone.  My whole life has felt like that.  Of course.  I would rather stand alone than evoke anger and rage.  But then, there are times when we’re forced to acknowledge that some situations cannot be managed alone.

I look at my mother now, and I realize that the only burden I become is the one she creates.  Like Jimmie, she looks at me, and she desperately needs my life to meet a certain standard, and when it falls short, she reacts as though the situation were her own.   But it’s not.  It’s mine.  And I say there is beauty here.