We cannot freefall through life and expect others to save us!

Sometimes, in spite of our desire to change, we continually make the same disempowering choices that prevent us from realizing our goals and desires. We must have come to understand at some level we afraid to change. We would rather stay where we are, even if we complain about it, than, go for something new. So, we keep falling into the proverbial hole that we know so well as a way to ensure that we will stay where it is familiar. 

You know the saying ‘Once burned, twice a fool?” Well, most of us have been burned too many times; we had become the village idiot. God has given us so many opportunities to save ourselves from pain and heartache but because of our refusal to listen to his guidance; our hearts were broken once more. If we had listen to God and step back to ask ourselves:  what is it that we want? Are our needs being met? Is this how we want to feel? Are we being true to ourselves? Are we sabotaging ourselves in our attempts to hold onto something that is not working? We would not have been in the hellhole we are in!

The truth is, we have been avoiding taking responsibility for ourselves by blaming others for our own unhappiness. By being involved in similar situations, with people with similar personalities, similar problems and wondering why it is not working.  We keep doing the same thing, and, expected to get different results. By carrying the same kind of emotional baggage, with the false beliefs about ourselves,  love, and relationships, repeating the same patterns, and also expecting that someone who has behaved the same way 10 times will change on the 11th time because we think they should, is crazy. If we put our hands in the fire ten times, we can be darn sure, we’ll burn it ten times,  it doesn’t matter that each time we put my hand in the fire we said ‘Please God don’t let it burn me!’ It is not hard for us to imagine God saying ‘Child, use the brain and common sense that I gave you! After all, it is the nature of the fire to burn. If you don't want to get burned, either stay away from or put on something to protect you from it."

Granted, it is not always easy to know how deep people's feelings or problems are at the beginning of a relationship, but people, for the most part, reveal things about themselves incrementally, through their words and actions. By revealing little by little, they are actually teaching us what to expect from them. How we choose to deal with whatever nonsense they put our way, teaches them what to expect from us, and what they can and cannot get away with. Basically, it is us who tell them how to treat us! We get what we expect and what we believe that we deserve.

Since we are responsible for our own happiness, thoughts and action, we need to take a leap of faith on us, and start doing something about it, instead of focusing on what is wrong with them or what their problem is.  Our life is about us, not about them. From here, the only thing we can do is make choices.  We can make a choice and say we like this pain and drama and we are not ready to be responsible for our own happiness. That is our prerogative and our choice; however, we need to remember that if we go with this option, the cause of our pain and our misery is our own doing, not an outside force.

On the other hand, we can choose to sit in the driver seat, to take charge of our life’s direction, to feel the pain, grieve, heal and build ourselves and feel infinitely better. We understand that getting back on the saddle will take time, time to heal, and time to get to know ourselves, to know who we are and what our needs are. Unfortunately, life does not come with a delete button; we cannot press one key and make all our mistakes as well as our pains disappear. We need to be patient with ourselves. We need to take one day at a time. 

Here in the west, we want to wrap up and put everything in a neat package, even grief. We do not want to see any mess of our former self. If there are any unpleasant leftover, then we will just sweep it under the rugs and hope it would stay there forever. We do not like to be vulnerable. We do not want to share our grieves with others. We feel grieving is a sign of weakness. However, the more we resist being open and vulnerable, the more loneliness and frustration persist. The fear of getting hurt blocks our love and keeps us from a secure and loving intimacy the problem is if we do not deal with our grief on timely basis, one day it would ambush us.

In Ethiopia, where I came from, grieving we lose a loved one is accepted, expected and honored. They don't hurry the recovery process. There are many levels and stages of grief.  The process has been organized as the year of mourning in to three days of deep grief, seven days of mourning, forty days of gradual readjustment and 11 months of remembrance and healing. Thus, the mourner is drawn forth from temporary isolation to increasingly larger personal and communal responsibility and involvement, until by the end of the year, he or she has been reintegrated in to the community and his or her loss has been accepted, though not forgotten.

I am not suggesting that whatever we need to grieve should take us a year, on the contrary, the amount of time we need or how we grieve is as diverse as the number of people in the planet. That is why the decision has to be individual decision, not group decision. We can not freefall through life waiting for some people, any person to pick us up and put us on the right path. We have to do it ourselves