To Live

As small children we may have felt like we needed to please people in order to survive. As we grow we still are likely to need love and acceptance. Whether we are immersed in relationships, running away from them, or have lost them, our lives are defined by relationships. We are surrounded, literally or figuratively, by people we need and love and pleasing them becomes a key component of our life. We try to please our parents. We grow up and perhaps become parents ourselves. We may appear as if we are beyond a child’s need for acceptance but that is really not the case. As adults, we also face bigger and bigger challenges, and bigger and bigger accomplishments or failures. Our heart leans backward toward our parents and forward to our future or the future of our children and their children. We have a constant opportunity to feel as if we have done “good” for our family or not. Life, love and pleasing others, become intertwined.

There is much to say about the difference between being a people pleaser or co-dependant, and an individuated individual. Here, I want to more poetically echo my position: Too often people claim to be developing boundaries, when they are more actually developing a rigid boundary to protect themselves. In my opinion, the deeper path is to keep our heart open and aware of our desire to love and please the people we love, while learning to self-sooth and stand on our own two feet.

Our own two feet have been given to us so we may walk toward people as well as away. Our own two feet give us the strength to carry ourselves, and others. It takes strength to need people. Want them. Go out on the limb, because it is the right thing to do. Strength enables us to care, react with kindness and nurturing instead of adding to the isolation. Adding life to what is sometimes a grey world. If we are truly strong, we will always bloom again and again.

Perhaps my dad helped me learn this because he lived most of his life with one leg of flesh and one of wood. When his wooden leg would hurt his flesh he would finish his task and sit down. Then he would stand up and continue.