Training Wheels

Some very dear friends packed up their belongings and moved to the other side of the country today.  My wife and I have spent almost every Sunday evening with this family for the past two years.  We met their daughter shortly after she was born and have watched her go from a newborn to beginning to crawl.  They are more than friends, they are family, and now they are physically distant from us.

This new physical distance can be sad at times.  The regularity with which we used see them, hug them, and share together is gone, yet the love has not diminished one bit.  The love remains.  The love will continue to grow, but the love must find a new way to be expressed and shared.  This is one reason that partings can be painful.  The way we experienced the love of the relationship so naturally needs to find new expression.

But lets be clear about that love.  Our friends are not the source of that love.  They inspire within us an experience of the love that is already part of who we are.  There is limitless, unconditional love that exists as who you are.  Certain people in our lives make it easier for us to tap into that love, experience it, and share it.  When those people depart from our lives, whether by a move to another state, or a move to another incarnation, the love we experienced is still with us, still available to be enjoyed and shared, still a part of who we are.  

When you first learned to ride a bike, you likely had training wheels.  When you first learned to swim, you maybe had water wings.  Eventually those tools, which helped you learn to ride and swim, had to be let go of so that you could really ride and swim.  The same is true for love.  Those that inspire us to greater expressions and experiences of the love that we are, are like wonderful training wheels.  Unlike training wheels, however, they are never forgotten, but continue to stretch our capacity to love when we are no longer able to regularly share the same physical space.