Blog 3346 – 12.31.2024
Relationship
On this last day of 2024, I think it is fitting that I write about what I believe to be the most important key to a joyful, a happy, and a fulfilling life. Yesterday, I heard journalist David Brooks give the most concise and clear definition of joy and happiness. “Happiness is the expansion of self. Joy is the loss of self in another or others.” We are at our highest and best not standing alone and apart, but in relationship.
On our death bed what is going to matter most to us is not some possession (i.e. a sledge name Rosebud) career success, awards achieved, victories won, or mountains climbed. What is going to matter most then and what should matter the most to us now are the close relationships in our lives.
The western myth of the lone cowboy, or the self-made man is a lie. We need others to become the highest and best versions of ourselves. Successes, victories, achievements bring a certain amount of ego stroking happiness, but true and lasting joy only comes when we lose ourselves in another or in others. We have all experienced failures in relationships that haunt us. And all too many give up trying and like the man with a fool-hearted memory in George Straits song by the same name we keep reliving the lost love like playing the same old song a thousand times with a thousand dimes.
The Bible shows us a picture of the divine in relationship – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. I think an even clearer picture of the divine is reflected in humanity as the divine masculine, the divine feminine, and the birth of the melding of both in the divine child. We are most of us opened up in our capacity to love when we have a child. Even those of us most afraid of intimacy find those self-protective barriers melt away when we hold a child in our arms and in our hearts.
We need connection, we need relationship, none of us is an island entire into ourselves. Tonight instead of singing the same Old Lang Syne let is make a New Year’s resolution to not allow ego’s quest for happiness to rob us of the joy of relationship. Friendships need tending to survive, children need love to thrive, and lovers need to be attentive to keep the fires of love and passion burning and alive.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White
Same Old Lang Syne ~ Dan Fogelberg
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