I just returned from my college reunion. While there, a classmate told me about a mutual friend whose behavior had been so hard to live with – way too much of the bottle – that her partner had left her. The woman, my friend said, felt “abandoned.”
I have puzzled over that phrase – abandoned – as my own yoga background has helped me understand that we are never alone.
There is one existence who can never abandon us. One companion from whom we can never be separated.That being is source itself – God – our eternal companion.
Some say that people can behave so badly that God withdraws. This is inaccurate and is not true. If God withdrew, as the source of our existence, we would cease to be. But as God is in everything, and is everything, he/she cannot withdraw from his/her self. It is circumstances and we ourselves who put layers of consciousness between source and ourselves.
When we wish to – when the need is so intense that we will brook no opposition – then we call out to source to help us, and we succeed in getting through all the interim layers of debris that are obscuring our connection to our own source.
People come and go in our lives. When we first experience their leaving, we can feel abandoned. This is not a useful attitude, for it can set up barriers to our enjoying the next person who enters our life. A better approach is to re-examine our own expectations of change. Nothing lasts forever; even the seasons come and go.
We can look at the relationships in our lives as lovely flowers in our own personal inner gardens. A flower blossoms, shares its beauty and fragrance with us, then wilts and dies – and another flower blossoms elsewhere to claim our attention. It is not a shock to our system to experience this natural ebb and flow of life in the garden, and it should not be a shock to experience this in our own lives as well. The secret, then, is to enjoy the beauty of each moment and each relationship while it is flowering, and not to be sad when its natural energy takes it away from us once more.
Seasons come and go. Flowers bloom and wither. The source remains eternally with us.