It's the sad truth, the sad reality, one we all must deal with... So how do we deal with it? There are people that will come into our lives and hurt us more than others, some will cause us greater pain just because we never expect them or we are taught that we should never expect them to hurt us.
Earlier I wrote on Facebook how we are never the same after we make a mistake or someone makes a mistake with us, I used a painted piece of wood as a metaphor: you paint the wood, start writing letters on it and make a mistake so them you have the choice of painting over it or sanding the mistake down and starting over, either way the wood is never the same and either way it takes time and effort to fix the mistake. See if you paint over the wood the mistake is under that paint, it's covered but it's still there and if you don't paint over it enough the shadow will always follow; on the other hand, if you sand it down you will have marks of the sand paper over the wood, no matter how hard you try the marks will remain there and it also takes a lot of effort and lots of patience...
So does fixing a relationship, it takes effort, it takes patience but most of all it takes two people to come to an agreement that the same mistake will not be repeated and to actually make the commitment that the mistake won't be repeated, then you can sand down and afterwards create something better, something stronger and more beautiful!
But what happens when the other person is unwilling to sand down the mistake? To paint over it enough to hide it and forget about it because with time it will be covered with something beautiful, then should you go ahead and spend time trying to fix that piece of wood? You shouldn't, you can't force someone to forget, to create new and better memories, sometimes people come into out lives just so that we learn a lesson, sometimes those people are someone we had one of the best relationships with and that's why it hurts us most when we have to let them go, especially if we made the mistake that hurt them and they are unwilling or unable to give a second chance... Then it is ok to go find a new piece of wood and create something better with it, not making the same mistake you made before and being grateful that you could learn from the past one.
What if you come to an agreement with this other person and apologies are given all around but after a while the person makes the same mistake again? Basically they created something beautiful only to throw an ugly color of paint over it after a while... Do you then try to fix that piece of wood again or do you walk away from it? Is it then fixable? Is it worth it? Maybe it is, but most likely it is not... A person that is given a second chance and ends up making the same mistake again is a person that is unwilling to change, so no matter how much you sand down the wood, how much you paint over it again, it will take more effort, more strength to build something better and more beautiful, and after it is built if the other person has not changed they will ruin it again... So it's best to walk away because at that point they've confused a second chance with the acceptance of bad behavior, and you should never accept bad behavior.
What about this: what about a person hurts you but they never apologize? What if they think that what they did was correct, if they think it was correct then there is no need to apologize, even when you tell them that they've hurt you they blame you for it... At some point if you are very close to this person you start to believe it and then you try and work on sanding down the wood, on painting over it but since the other person does not think they made a mistake they keep throwing the ugly paint over the wood and then what? Should you keep working on making the wood beautiful? No, you shouldn't. This is also accepting bad behavior and a relationship will never be good if one person just accepts the bad behavior of the other because at one point this person will end up breaking the wood to the point of it being unfixable, and after the wood is broken they will break you! And you are like a piece of glass, if it is broken and you try to glue it together it's never the same... However, you can always pick up the pieces melt them together and make a better you, once you've walked away from those that only know how to break things.
With all the examples above, when you find that you can't save the relationship, when you find it that it is not worth creating something new, or that you tried to do so but couldn't, you will also find yourself broken in millions of little pieces like when a glass breaks, because every time we can't fix a relationship with someone we love we get broken. But if we have the courage, if we find the strength and the patience to pick up all those little pieces, melt them up and make something better, make ourselves better it is then that we have not really lost because when we can transform pain into a positive thing, when we use it as a drive to become better ourselves rather than use it as a force to stop us from keeping going then we have won something that very few have learned: the power of self-transformation, the power to rise from the ashes and not let our past mistakes define us and with that we earn the power to attract good to us because the better we become, the more we convert pain into something positive the more we will attract people that do just that and what a gift that can be! So don't ever feel bad for those pieces of wood that couldn't be fixed, learn from them and become a better you! And with those that you are able to fix and create something more beautiful, cherish those! They don't come along very often, those are the ones that will continue to become more and more beautiful as time goes by, those are the second chances that make life worth it, that fill life with hope and you can't never go wrong with something that fills you with hope!
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