Bha, I love you.

About a year and a half ago, Bhagirl sent me a little prayer that changed both our lives.

"I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you,
and I am I,
And if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped."

A prayer, by Perls, that we have discussed many times, (though not enough) about what these words mean to us, what lessons is it teaching us, and if this prayer was in fact a very radical way of thinking.

In the past year, we have both struggled to live by this principle. Events in her life have challenged her to re-evaluate her belief in the prayer. Events in my life have also made me sit down, take a pen and paper and try and understand the million thoughts that this prayer puts in my head.

We have both gone back and forth on how difficult it is to live by this principle. It takes away from you your most valuable defense against pain and disappointments. The defense of blaming someone else, the defense of pointing fingers at someone else, the defense of someone else's failure to meet expectations and of looking good, pure and victimized in your own eyes.

It is not easy living without expectations.

Its not easy to be so detached from the people you interact with on a daily basis, to see them as individuals that they are and to understand and appreciate that they have to live their own course, walk their own path and it may not always be by your side.

It is sometimes a lonely path, I have found. To walk without expectations. To be detached.

But the prayer has taught me unconditional love. And I feel a bright glow from within knowing that I love others not because they make me happy. I love others not because they will never hurt me. I love others not because we have the same goals, the same viewpoints and the same values.

I love because I love them, because I care for them, because when they are in pain, something within me hurts.

It has made me redefine love.

Love no longer means a gratification of my desires, or an approval of who I am.

It is the acceptance of who the other person is.

Love is no more a sexual desire to fulfill, a hunger to feed.

It is a friendship based on understanding that people I love are individuals on their own and I can never take that away from them.

I have discovered how overrated romantic love is, with its emotional roller coasters, its ecstatic highs and self-esteem shattering lows. How turbulent an ocean it is.

How we jump into this ocean with that someone special and struggle to survive. And in the struggle, we hurt the other and ourselves because we are not able to draw strength from within. Because we depend on someone else to support us, to make sure we do not drown in the madness.

But how can we survive together when we each need to take care of ourselves first to be able to look after another?

How sustainable is this love? How stable? How realistic? Are divorce rates higher now because such a love has been so idealized? I am sure people survive such a love, but there has to be something else sustaining them. A strength from within. No one can survive on romantic love alone.

With this prayer, I have found a love that is calm. A love that is not purely romantic, or familial. But a love that has no boundaries of fulfilling romantic expectations, or familial expectations.

Its not always easy to be there. As both she and I know.

Its a challenge to get to the calm center of your being.

Especially when we each have a wild ocean of emotions within us.

It took me a long time to admit that I am a very emotional person. That my emotions run deep and are very intense. I am never able to stop myself from feeling the whole emotional range. And it gets exhausting.

There have been events in my life that have made me hate my emotions. Hate the fact that I am alive, that I feel pain. But I have realised that I am not addicted to my emotions, that I can let go of things past and the thought that I can try and restart on a fresh page whenever I need to is very liberating.

There have been many times that I have wanted to become numb, because while it might make me a 2 dimensional person with no depth, it will allow me to breath without pain in my every breath.

But I have never managed to achieve the numbness.

For these reasons, the prayer has been very difficult to follow. I thought you required numbness to understand the prayer.

But I was wrong. The prayer advocates that you be in control of your emotions and curb any desire you might have to control others for your own happiness. But it also teaches you power over your emotions, instead of allowing emotions to control you.

Sometimes it feels like I am in a kind of an amusement park ride, where everyone is standing on their own and the world is moving us in all directions, back and forth and I am trying to hold on to someone else, so I might not fall, or I am trying to hold onto something else so I might survive the whirlpool of life.

But the prayer tells us to stand on our own.

To deeply plant your feet onto the ground, to be aware of your surroundings and your inner positions, to spread your hands out to the wind, to take your place on the playground and just breath and balance.

To understand that others, who are also trying to survive the ride, will run into you, shake you, but never let them topple you over.

But should someone topple you over, amidst the whirlpool, to stand up again, against all forces and regain your balance.

Its not an easy prayer to live by.

The road used to get painful to walk.

But now, I have realised, the road is not really painful. I have found my clutches.

Clutches that no one can take from me. Clutches that I can source from within me.
My emotional strength. My resilience.

Both of us have been struck down at how unfair the world can be.

How much it is out to hurt and break our backs.

A friend once told me, Life can be bullshit, You are born and then you die and what happens in between is a blink of an eye.

And in that blink of an eye, each experience is intensified. Each experience pierce thru your heart like many sharp daggers or lifts you up in ecstasy like viking ride.

But the prayer has helped both of us stand stronger.

To understand that my self worth is determined by how I look in my eyes and not how others look at me.

To develop my own moral values and to live by them, without fear of judgment from others and without self doubt.

Have we achieved it?

Sometimes, we don't think so, esp as we swim across our turbulent ocean of emotions to find the calm.
Sometimes it takes a long time to find the calm, and the exhausting swim takes the life out of us.

But both of us have discovered, that eventually, we find our calm.

We find that one place where the water surrounds us, removes fatigue and exhaustion from our limbs, where our weight is negligible and there nothing but serene peace around us.

It is for that place where I can be I, and she can be she and its beautiful because we have one another that we live by the prayer.

It is for that knowledge that I can survive alone, but I choose to walk with you that we live by the prayer.

OK I am done yapping.