I have learned to wait.
It’s not that I like waiting. I grew up with ADD behaviours and my control was manipulation for the longest time. Pushing buttons was easy for me, because I could read people well and stay ahead of them.
The biggest gift I ever got from love was someone who refused to let me manipulate them. They resisted my grand gestures, teaching me that if I really loved them, I had to let them grow in their own time. We eventually parted, though they have lived in my heart since. Even thought I saw them in Sears last week.
I remember a carnival that came through town while I was a kid. Blaring from the bobsled ride, on speakers louder than I had ever heard before, blared The Supremes singing “You Can’t Hurry Love.” I guess the operator just loved that bouncy, head-bopping tune, wanting to hear it over and over again.
In all my life, the lesson I keep learning over and over and over again is the lesson Florence, Mary and Diana were trying to tell me when I was ten. You can’t hurry love.
Performance Guy asked me if that meant all I could do was make sure I was out in the world enough to take advantage of bizarre coincidences.
I resisted that term.
To me, what happens in the world aren’t bizarre coincidences, they are divine confluences. People, energy and things just come together, opening up and creating connections that you could never expect or plan for. Follow your bliss and be in the moment to find the most amazing things happening to you.
Love is the ultimate divine surprise. It comes when pathways cross and people connect, linking hearts in ways we never could have imagined, bringing out strengths in us we could not tap in any other way.
Love stories are always about moments when hearts crack, moments when we feel safe and loved enough to offer safety and love to those close to us. The feelings twist together in those moments, the bitter with the sweet, the sour with the salty, making a mix that just takes us out of our convention, losing our fear and becoming new.
The surprise everyone wants is that moment when love releases our heart from the everyday in a way that makes us feel the spark of the divine.
You can’t hurry love. And it’s easy to fall for cheap thrills when love appears challenging.
But love, well, love will transform you if you let it in, multiplying your power to do amazing things.
Love is the ultimate divine surprise and the only way to have it is to be open to the divine confluences that open you to love, be they romance or sickness.
I lived in love for the decade I took care of my parents full time, but it sure wasn’t the kind of love about which great romantic stories are told. It was love, though, and always surprising, bringing out qualities in me that I wouldn’t have otherwise known that I have.
My job now, I fear, is to be ready for love again, to be ready to be surprised by a new kind of love and connection, a new and unpredictable divine confluence that brings a new and transformative divine surprise. I need to be ready for a new story even as I fear that the future will all be just too damn much for what I have left.
You can’t hurry love. But you can embrace it and welcome its effects into your life, whatever they are and however they transform you. Your love is powerful and graceful, and when you let it out, to nurse a dying loved one or to get naked with a lover, divine surprises happen that make life hot, warm and worthwhile.
May you feel the sparks of love today in a way you could never have expected, being caught up in in a divine confluence that brings a divine surprise. Follow your bliss and open your heart, be passionate and vulnerable, letting love in.
And pray that I can do the same, eh?
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Callan 