Lovevolvelovevolve

It was another amazing week. Did you know that life isn’t fair? It often isn’t easy. It comes with challenges, pain, and setbacks. I have been reminded of this over and over again through the heartache faced by my niece and her family as they maneuver the unimaginable weight created by their 2 year-old son’s leukemia, and one of my dearest friends was held up at gunpoint, left alive but feeling her freedom and peace of mind were taken away along with her purse. The purse can be replaced. Fear is harder to extract. Can there really be happiness here? I still believe it’s possible.

We keep trying to run away from tension and pain in our lives. We crave our comfort zone, and it is wonderful when we get to enjoy a smooth patch of life now and then. However, by its nature the human experience brings with it much we do not understand and it contains its fair share of inevitable twists and turns.

Life is far better when we discover how to surrender to it… all of it… even the hard parts, and to conserve our energy rather than resist. Durable happiness is ours when we discover that we can experience it despite the hurdles and potholes. The simple miracles of life actually taste even sweeter because we value the blessings by having known their opposites or by having weathered our way through hard decisions.

To love and to evolve, these are what we are called to do here on this journey from our head to our heart.

Lovevolvelovevolve.

Although we are spiritual beings, we are living a human experience that is sometimes beyond our comprehension. Because we are human, our progress is not always in forward steps. But through tension and simple joys, forward and backward steps, we can find our way to seeing that love is present and possible at the high points as well as amidst tension.

Though life sometimes calls for three steps forward followed by two back, leaning in a forward direction in spite of the circumstances brought to us by life is what allows us to experience deeper meaning, fuels our consciousness, and stretches our evolution. It’s what provides meaning and possibility to what we cannot fully make sense of. Personal growth seems to require tension in our lives. Happiness requires courage.

Tension, suffering, and pain are initiat