How do you balance giving a partner the grace and patience that you yourself would want, while also acknowledging the gut feeling that someone may not be ready for you?
With a question like this, it’s clear that you’ve already done some very compassionate (and also pragmatic) thinking around you and your beloved. And that’s the most important step. Often the hardest part is getting here in the first place — it’s the nature of the human ego to work persistently to position itself as the victorious (or victimized) protagonist of every story, through its subjective perception of its experiences and circumstances. But not only are you concerned about the well-being of yourself, your partner and the relationship. You also seem ready to consider the possibility that extending grace and patience to your partner might lead to a situation that’s not the most comfortable or familiar, which requires the ego taking on its most dreaded task: Submitting to the strength of the soul.
In this sense, the balance that you seek, and also the courage that you seek to pursue that balance, can come with time — if you can commit to the practice of accepting bottomlessness. I’m referring to what might be the only certain thing about the human experience, which is uncertainty. Our minds grasp tightly at illusions of stability, a semblance of a foundation. We roam relentlessly through our memories of the past and ruminate restlessly on the future, thinking, if only it was this perfectly verifiable way, or that exactly quantifiable way. If only things were unshakable, then I could really start to live. But the pursuit of that false “certainty,” the anxiously feeling around in the darkness for solid, packed earth, is ultimately fruitless. Sometimes the best way to win the game is to stop playing and look up at the sky. Balance can be an illusion. The past is gone. The future doesn’t exist. But the present moment is as real as it gets. You’re already here. There’s no destination. The current breath, the current heartbeat you’re experiencing at exactly this moment, is all you have. It is the whole point. And that means that the nature of life is this bottomlessness. Everything is, and is not. Nothing also is, and is not. And how comforting could it be, to find a place of calm in accepting this, knowing that it’s the only sure and true thing that you have? Even coming to love that same bottomlessness for providing your heart with something certain?
This is the kind of balance that’s worth living for. Accept every outcome in front of you. Accept the world where your grace and patience open portals of greater intimacy and longevity for your relationship. Accept the alternate dimension where your grace and patience aren’t enough to keep the relationship together, but they are just what is needed to lovingly release your partner (and yourself) into timelines that will make you happier and more aligned in the long run. Both outcomes can be beautifully energizing, transformationally sweet. And if you can’t yet accept the bottomless uncertainty of these outcomes, acknowledge and accept that reality — and affirm your desire to keep trying. That can be just as powerful as already being there.
It takes courage to be this open to the uncertainty of love’s many characters, forms, vessels and iterations. Love doesn’t always look like the love your ego, which always wants to feel right, imagined for itself at first. But when it’s love, you feel it in your spirit. Keep moving with grace and patience, which can create the kind of love that you and your partners’ highest selves — not your egos — need to feel whole and understood.
Goth Shakira is an Aquarian Queen of Pentacles divining and loving in Los Angeles.
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