GIVEN...


Given

If you’re given to quitting, falling deeply in love isn’t for you.

If you’re happier reading about love than falling in love - real love - hot mess love, don’t bother.

But if you’ve made yourself steadfast, ready to have your knee fall, and the wind fill your sails and the waves to also treacherously cross your bow, the wind to threaten to snap your masts - if you view apparent failure as a temporary setback, eventually providing a bridge over a what appears to be a deep, black abyss - then fall in love.  Deeply in love. Dissolve.  Know that you will sometimes feel like you are dying.  You will want to give up.  Often and Badly.  Don’t.

You’ll feel like you are trying to salvage an irredeemable mess. You’ll feel like at times that your life is missing a chapter. You’ll misplace your heart, but then again find it. Your friends will ask if those “things you talked about”, that felt so right, were really real. A hundred thoughts will reject your hearts most ardent desires. Five thousand people will tell you, “I’ve always wanted to fall in love - but it is not real - a fantasy and a fool's errand.” 

And when that happens - and it will happen.  You are going to confront many a blank page with a heart of grand ideas, and you’re going to fantasize about living with the love of your life.  Your whirlwind - and you’ll have an image of your whole unwritten life in your heart and mind.  With that person who will shine with you - and be the light of your life.

Then you’ll embark on the journey of actually living - on faith, in love.  Without ceasing.  Embracing and falling again and again.  With someone you know at heart, loves you.  Will catch you.  Will take your breath away.  And you will feel at times you are at the brink of disaster.  You will never be more vulnerable.  You will never feel so alive.

 

I have felt alive.  God forbid, that I miss what is there, tranquil, beckoning, right before my eyes.

 

-William W. Collins

12/9/18 9:14 PM
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