Blog 537 – 02.06.2017

Kindred Spirits or Soul Mates

Thinking people are forever questioning even and especially the things that they are most sure of. I have questioned the central premise of most of our understandings about romantic love – that there is for each one of us a “soul mate” a counter part, a yang to our yang, a better or completing half. I have said and rather loudly that I just do not buy it. Sometimes such heated and hard stands need to be modified, re-examined, re-studied, looked at again from a different angle. I would like to do that again with you.

First let me say the biggest problem that I have with the soul mate, or one great love theory, is that I have loved many people in my life and have a real problem rating our ranking those loves. To me any love, short or long, shallow or deep, weak or strong is a great love. And secondly I really have come to believe that each of us does have a better half, as it were, a higher self, and that our puny weak or lesser self is often bullied into submission by a made up alter-ego called oddly enough ego. That better, higher self is our Divine and true nature or self. Having said all that I would like to examine what I think of as soul mates or kindred spirits.

We have all met people in our travels through life that we felt an immediate affinity towards or people we came to have a close relationship to. It is almost as if we knew them in a previous life and made a pact to meet up again in subsequent adventures to be a sort of encouragement to. (I am really ending a lot of sentences in this piece with prepositions – I hope that is not off putting to you grammar buffs. Sometimes the rules of logic and grammar just do not apply.) Kindred Spirits is one of those cases. Do you understand what I am talking about? I think what many of us mean when we use the phrase, “falling in love” is that same idea of finding a Kindred spirit. It is so rare for many of us (We ought to get out more) that perhaps we have come to believe that there is only one for us.

I have watched people “fall in love” over and over again claiming to have found the one special one, myself included. That it reminds me of school children with their “best friend” or high schoolers with their “steady.” Every have more than one best friend, or more than one “steady” at a time? Oh, I know that’s against the rules. Whose rules? And on what planet? Certainly not earth. Don’t get me wrong, penguins they say do mate for life, but people are not penguins though in a tuxedo the resemblance is uncanny and Charlie Chaplin and the Batman’s Penguin did have the walk down.

All I am saying is that the heart wants what the heart wants and that we are connected in so many ways that we can hardly imagine. So what if you never find the one and only, maybe it’s really you anyway and instead of that we ought to be looking for kindred spirits to help us through this adventure to the next. Or at least that is what I think. What about you, fallen in love lately or met a kindred spirit?

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White