Whom We Love

"In a relationship, one mind revises the other; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors [coteries of ingrained information patterns] activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love."  From  A General Theory of Love 

It was this last line that stopped me in my tracks.  If it was the only thing I got from the book it would have been worth three-, four-, five times its cost.  Here was the essential truth about love, what no one told you.  It made perfect sense to me, perhaps because my leap was so recent and I could see how such a change in choosing who to love would alter me as well.  It rung me true, that line, and I'm reverberating still.  

A day earlier, I found this quote which summed up, in many ways, the last 10 years of my life or so.  It takes courage to take off the gloves.  It's scary and then wild and then joyous.  And it's so necessary, if you want to live life as opposed to having your life live you.  Here's the quote from Mark Nepo and The Book of Awakening:

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.

It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable."

Loving Bryan changed me and is changing me.  I am no longer quite that woman who felt more dead than alive, who bound herself tight to keep herself safe and looked out her window at the world but never really was a part of it.  And all sorts of unimaginable things suddenly seem not just imaginable, but possible.