sharing is caring

They say you can't love someone else until you love yourself.

This is about caution. This is about effort. This is about respect. This is about the staving of sorrow.

And it's true, in the way that they mean - you can't really do a good job of it, a bona fide big-boy college try, complete with self-awareness and follow-through.

You can't care for someone - well - until you know how to, and are willing to, care for yourself.

But you can fall in love with myriad aspects of what others have to show you, and the rest of the world, even without knowing how to identify those same aspects in yourself (or with, but still without knowing how to view them, as part of a part of that world).

It's not always just envy, or jealousy. It's not always only that, for sure.

You may do a better, a different, job of it, knowing what it is you may love about yourself, but the stumbling isn't so much there. You can fall, whole-hog, at any time. Repeatedly. Successively, if not successfully.

And you can, on occasion, love someone else so much that they become a part of you. Then, you're loving a part of yourself, even when what's kept on growing around that part isn't so easy for your human eyes.

You become willing to care for yourself. Housing, as you are, these pieces of a humanity you love.

You become responsible. You become acquainted with what it is to grow up, and keep those better impulses.

Once upon a time you wouldn't have wanted to. Once upon a time you would have wished to be pitiable, but not pitied. Somehow held, trembling, just above being discarded. For your usefulness, and not for your love. A dubiously sustainable state.

Once upon a time you couldn't have dreamed of being held in such a way; of being entrusted with holding.

It's much easier gentler calmer more straightforward nicer to grow up by way of love. Perhaps you can even approach the endeavor in such a manner as - imagine - peacefully. Say, gracefully.

These are very, very special occasions. Do you see? All who parrot the proverb agree. However, again repeatable.

You can do it once, twice, three times. You can do it with fifty people, three times over. You can do it with too many people to count.

I think that's what God does.

(I think that's what God wants us to do.)

When I put it like that, I think I can accept the fact that it's not easy.