With some regularity over the course of the past two years, I have come thought about why the people in my life are in my life, and why there is something of a commonality to all of them. In a session I had with a very good psychic about three years ago, as she was performing reiki on me soon after my wife’s death, she reminded me that different people have come into my life and have taken this journey with me because they have something to teach me and I have something to teach them.
That blew me away, as you might expect. I have long believed in reincarnation and the soul’s perfectability, and have come to think of our multiple lives as the process of the soul perfecting itself on its road to enlightenment. If Nirvana or Heaven are anything they are a state of enlightenment. Jesus and the Buddha, the current Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa are all humans whom I would call enlightened beings since they have come to transcend the human condition even as they participate in it. Getting to that stage is the soul’s on-going work, and the people in our worlds are the teachers we need at that moment to help us along the way.
Wow!! That to me was a mind-bending concept. I made me stop and wonder if there was any commonality among my mother, my father, my in-laws, my wife, my children, my fiancé, and the seemingly random people who pass through my world.
As I looked at all of these people, I certainly see that one of the threads is patience and dedication. My wife was a very dedicated person. She could spend hours, days, weeks at a task, doggedly working with incredible patience at the minute details of whatever project she had in front of her. You could always count on the fact that if she put her mind to something, she was going to learn how to do it, and the product of what she did would be solid and worthwhile. That’s what made her an excellent trainer: she could sit for hours and pick apart a computer software program, understand how it worked, and then put that understanding together into a learning package that really helped others understand what it was and how it worked and how it would be useful to them. She had a gift for detail and for clear teaching.
She was a Taurus, a determined person ruled by Venus, the goddess of beauty. When work is looked at through this lens, it is clear that “beauty” is in the finely-crafted product with all of its attendant details. As I have come to understand myself better, I realize that my basic Cancerian personality, with its emphasis on home and comfort, is also controlled by Gemini rising, where flightiness and airiness and a tendency to flit from thing to thing is a controlling force. And surely, my life has had plenty of that as I have too often looked elsewhere for my happiness, thinking that something is what I wanted only to attain it and find it unfulfilling and ultimately move on to something else. This spiritual wanderlust made for some very unsettling times. How my wife put up with me for too many years as I seemed to constantly be looking elsewhere for my happiness (maybe a new job would be the one; surely living in Massachusetts would be better than living in West Virginia, etc;) I’ll never know.
So, why did she come into my life? Most likely to teach me perseverance, the beauty in the finely-crafted thing. It took a long time, and I am still fighting with that tendency, but so much less than I used to. Janis, bless you for giving me that gift, for helping me to appreciate the beauty of this moment and of the job well-done over time, and the patience to focus on the task and not let it go until I was comfortable with the fact that it was the best I could make it.
As part of a continuum of that teaching and learning, I feel that my fiancé has those same things to learn. It became eerily clear to me that I was a conduit in some kind of celestial psychic process when I came to understand her personality and her strengths and weaknesses, and saw that the sticktoitiveness and perseverance that I had learned from my wife (a form of patience) was something that was going to benefit my fiancé, just as the calm tranquility she demonstrates in the face of challenge is something that will benefit me (since I tend to fly off the handle into an overtly emotional reaction to challenge). I see similar processes at work in my relationship with my daughter, who interestingly is adopted (there is a suggestion I have heard that even adoptive kids “choose” their parents). My daughter obviously has lessons to learn related to loss (she lost her biological mother when she was given up for adoption, then lost her adoptive mother who died three years ago) and other things that I’m not sure of. Exactly where I fit into this equation isn’t quite clear to me yet (even after 20 years of living with her), however I’m sure that the loss of my wife/her mother is part of the learning plan for both of us, probably having to do with appreciation for what we see in front of us, the beauty of the here and now and for the world that is immediately around us.
May the Spirit that holds us all together help to guide you in your understanding of the people who have chosen to walk your journey with you. Learn from them; you are becoming the person you were meant to become.
Namaste.
