Life with love (Week 9)

Growing up, love wasn't exactly how I envisioned it to be. 

I always saw kids with parents constantly with them or being taken to grocery stores, and I've been jealous of children with parents who would take them grocery shopping.  

Grocery shopping is such a simple task, but when you combine it with your loved ones - it becomes just a treat to be able to go shop for goodies and things you'd like together.

It's quite strange, isn't it? To want something so basic due to the lack of having it growing up. We take so many things like this for granted because we don't see the bigger picture. It's such a sad thought that if we constantly had the good things in life, we wouldn't be able to appreciate them because we don't really know what bad is. 

I've learned the hard way to give into situations where I didn't feel the most comfortable or at ease and to let myself become stronger after being vulnerable however many times I was scared or hurt. Each time I came back, I learned something new and became a better version of myself. "I am sympathetic to the Buddhist conception that terrible behavior is unskilled behavior that comes from ignorance." (Pipher, pp 128) This quote means so many things to me, and one of them is that sometimes we only see things the way we want to because of this ignorance as mentioned by Pipher. We don't know any better, so we don't view things differently or we see it "la vie en rose" (french saying through rose-colored lens), like when someone says or does something that isn't perfect, but all you view and see from it is perfect because you're blindsided or don't know any better. 

This is why I ask you to take off those glasses and go see the world for what it truly is - unruly and filled with pain... because sometimes the pain is good for us. It helps us continuously fight to better our friendships, marriages, relationships, and even ourselves. This rose-colored world we're viewing deserves to be given recognition for the hardships. Without it, we wouldn't have progressed to where we are today.