Faith In The Path

I think it is fair to say, that over the last week or so, I have been suffering doubt. I have called into question my path and I have asked myself whether what I am doing, is truly the one path that I have been seeking?  Do I truly walk in the light, or have I convinced myself of this fact?  In essence, is everything I believe in and everything that I have written nothing more than one great falsehood, deceiving not only myself, but others as well?  Could that be the truth?

Everyone, and I mean everyone, suffers from doubt.  Look at the most confident person you know, a person who struts around boldly, head held high, never seeming to flinch under the stresses or strains of life, and it is easy to imagine that they are infallible, that they are blessed with a suit of armour that deflects away all negativity, that lets doubt and fear slide easily away, without so much as leaving a dent or a scratch.  The truth is that not one person has ever existed on this planet who did not have a moment of doubt, a moment of self-reflection where a shoot of negativity threatened to engulf them and pull them below, into the icy waters of darkness.  It happens to everyone.  Period.

I had returned to Costa Rica from a one week vacation in Nicaragua with a female friend of mine.  The vacation was enjoyable, but it left me with a sense of rejection.  Here was someone I found attractive, whose heart and soul I had gotten to know through our shared writing, and who comprehensively told me on several occasions that they were not interested in me in that way.  Not that I wanted to do anything to spoil a friendship, I have too much respect and integrity not only for my friend, but also for myself, and to be honest, I was not entirely convinced of the plausibility of getting together anyway.  And besides this, my heart is the deciding factor, always has and always will be.  By being told over and again that nothing could happen, that there was no chance, seemed to damage my ego and touched that place in my soul that is so full of negativity and self-doubt about myself.  That is a place that broils and smoulders like the lava of a volcano that awaits its release, so that it can flow free and unhindered.  That is a place, that I fight hard to avoid, less I should be drawn down too far, and never make my way back to the sunlight once more.  Although it was not rejection in the truest sense, since I had made no advances and it was never really a possibility, it nonetheless came over to me as such and I took it that way.

Since my return to work from this vacation, I have been working flat out, crazy, long days.  In my work as a scuba diving instructor, I am contractually meant to have one day off every five days, but the reality is that I am lucky if I get one day off each week.  If there are things to be done, then my boss expects his staff to work, even if a day off was overdue.  Often, it is possible to work eight, nine or even ten days straight, and then receive just a singe day free.  Not knowing when your day off will come means that it is impossible to make any plans with your time, since you are never sure if you are free the next day, until 8pm or so of the evening before.  The days can be long and physically demanding, and here in Costa Rica, there is the heat and humidity of each day that saps at you.  Some days, you don't get a chance for a break, having to eat lunch on the go.  Some days, we start at 6:30am and don't get done until 5pm.  It can be brutal and it is not for the faint hearted, nor for those seeking an easy life.

But of course, the boss is grateful for all of the things that you do, that essentially keeps his business running and him enjoying the profits, right?  Wrong.  In the 20 months that I have worked at this one job, the boss has uttered the words "thank you" only once.  Not once has he offered to buy the staff a beer for a hard days grafting - not even on Christmas Day, when we also have to work a full day.  He demands loyalty of his staff, but gives nothing in return.  And the pay?  That must be the reward for all this effort, surely?  This is not a job you do for the financial rewards.  If that is what you seek, then consider another career path.

It is no small wonder that I began to question my path.  Is scuba diving really my passion?  Aren't I getting too old to do this now?  Should I continue to stay away from England, from my parents, my brother and sister?  Is it my transient lifestyle that prevents me from finding the love in another soul that I seek?  Am I truly happy doing what I am doing, living overseas, always changing my home, my friends, my job? Why can I not find love?  What is wrong with me, that I seem to suffer constant rejection?  Doubts.  Tendrils of darkness, creeping in to consume my soul.

And then the light comes again.  A brilliant whiteness that obliterates everything that stands before it.  Nothing can resist it.  It burns away all darkness, it takes despair and turns it to joy, it casts away doubt, crushes it, sweeps it aside, an unrelenting force, like the breakers that crash into the shore, driven on by the winds of a ferocious storm.  What has happened to so completely turn around my thinking?

Under the ocean, I find my home, my peace, my tranquility.  In the depths, I find life.  And it is that life, that fills me with such joy and passion for what it is that I do.  Blessed with seeing two giant manta rays, blessed with watching white tip reef sharks, blessed with witnessing huge schools of fish, blessed with casting my eyes on an abundance of life, blessed with being allowed to fill my soul with life, with miracles and in so doing, with joy.  A deep sensation of utter, complete joy at life and not only life, but love.  Love for what I do.  Love for where I am.  Love for who I am.  Love for daring to dream.  Love for daring to walk and to take that first step.  Love for all those who have shared my journey and my path.  Love for England, for my mother, my father, my brother and my sister, without whom I could not be here.  Love.

Then more than this.  A pretty girl at the hotel smiles at me and our eyes meet.  In a single moment, an insignificant moment of time, something significant transpires.  An energy transfers from her to me and from me to her.  A few days later, we meet again and I boldly ask her to go for a drink. Carpe diem.  It is my way.  She agrees.  I knew she would.  I never doubted it.  I can't explain why.  I just knew it.  We meet the next evening, we talk, and as I gaze into one of the most beautiful faces that I have ever had the pleasure of sharing conversation with, I know.  I know that here and now, I could fall in love and become utterly lost.  Drawn in by those eyes, drawn in by the passion that is so evident in her face as she speaks of her love of dancing, of her love of teaching.  I am lost.  We kiss.  It is enough.  My soul and my heart believe once more.  I know that somewhere out there, if I am daring enough, if I have belief in myself, I will find the one for which I have spent my entire life seeking.

I rediscovered my faith.  I found again that I am on the right path.  There is no denying that I love what I do.  There can be no denying that I love the life that I have made for myself, because it is the life that I chose, that I carved into the history of time.  The problem is not what I do, the problem is only where I do it.  Choosing to suffer needlessly when I could choose to move on, if I so wished.  But I love the ocean life here.  It is rich and it is what fills my soul with life and love.  I have faith once more that I will find the love in another heart and soul.  I know it.  I do truly believe it.  Until that day, I will have faith in my path.  I will continue to walk my path, in my own way and I will continue to bask in the light that comes from my heart.  Because that light, is the light of love, and, as I have said many times before, love is all there really ever is.

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We Accept The Love We Think We Deserve

Last night, I watched the film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, starring Emma Watson, Ezra Miller and Logan Lerman.  During one scene, the main character Charlie, asks his English teacher why nice people always chose the wrong people to date?  The teacher replies, "We accept the love we think we deserve."

As soon as I heard these words, they struck a chord deep within me, a chord which resonated to the truth of them.  I realised the truth of them because they applied to me.  After the film had ended, I thought on these words and I reflected on my own life.  I thought about each of my past relationships and I was able to see that always, I chose to accept the love that I thought I deserved, which in my case, has often been the wrong kind of love.  The pattern of my past loves has always been the same.  Until last night, I did not understand why that was.  Now I do.

All of my life, since those first impressionable days, when I was evolving my thoughts and my views on how the world worked, I have carried around with me a very poor residual self image.  I have suffered from low self-esteem for most of my life.  When I was young, around the age of seven, I began to put on weight.  Throughout all of my formative years, I was what would be classed as a 'fat kid'.  Added to this, I have always been short in height compared to my peers, something that has never changed.  At the age of 12, my group of friends and I were avidly reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.  At school one day, one of my friends said that I looked like the character Bombur from the story.  For those who have never read the book, and who have not yet seen the movie by Peter Jackson, Bombur is the fattest, slowest dwarf, who is always eating.  The nickname was picked up by pretty much everyone in my school year and it was used so much, that when one of my classmates was handing back our exercise books after being marked by the teacher, he stopped and had to ask, "Who is Andrew Smith?" 

Being short and fat tends not to make one attractive to the opposite sex.  As my friends and the other boys of my school year were going out on dates, getting their first kisses, getting their first girlfriends, I was only getting rejected.  Every girl that I asked out said no to me.  It took all of my courage to ask, only to have my dreams quashed in an instant.  Funnily enough, as I think back now, as I told my friends one day at school, how I had cycled around to the home of a certain girl that I had a crush on and had asked her out on a date, the friend who gave me the nickname Bombur said to me that I had courage.  Even back then, at the age of twelve, the spirit of carpe diem was alive in me.  Now that is a very comforting thought to me as I sit and write this.

Everything that happened to me throughout these formative years reinforced in me the ideas that I was ugly, that I was a failure, that I was worthless.  My self-esteem, which I can recall was high early in my life, was sank further and further.  Every time I received another rejection, it only served to reinforce this notion of myself.  I used to lay in bed some nights and cry myself to sleep, telling myself that I was short, fat and ugly and that no one wanted me, that I was unloved, that I would never find love.  By the age of eighteen, after suffering from years of teasing and often being the butt of a joke, I did something about myself.  I had another moment of carpe diem, I dropped all of my so-called friends, and I began to change myself.  I lost the weight that had dogged me for so many years, but by then, the damage to my sense of esteem was already done.  I had formulated the opinion that I was not worthy of love and that I was unattractive.

Eventually, I did enjoy my first kiss, my first date, my first girlfriend and I fell in love for the first time.  My relationships never last very long though.  It has been remarked to me that I always let the 'good ones' go.  Often I have had the opportunity to form a long term relationship and I have walked away from it.  Back then, I could never have said why.  I always said to myself it is because I was scared of commitment, but now I have come to realise that this is not actually true.  My long term relationships have all been for the most part pretty complicated affairs.  I have never been able to figure out why this is.  Why is it that these relationships never ran smoothly? Why do I always fall in love with women that I think I can fix with my love?  Why do I persist in chasing someone who has doubts about a relationship with me, in the hope that I can make them change their mind?  Why do I try so hard to make someone love me?  Why do I continue to persist in a relationship when all of the signals are telling me no?  Why do I feel the need to prove that I am more worthy than another?  The answer lies in that line: we accept the love we think we deserve.

Last night, the truth was revealed to me through this line in the movie.  As those words were spoken, so I realised the utter truth of them for myself.  I have, for so many years, felt that I was unworthy of love, that I was undeserving of love.  Therefore, when love came knocking, I rejected those relationships that had real potential and instead, I chose those that were always going to involve complication.  In retrospect, I can see now that perhaps deep inside of me, I already knew the relationships would fail before they had even begun.  I was never conscious of thinking that at the time because at the time it happened, I was swept away by the romance of the situation and by the act of falling in love.  But I think that on some very deep subconscious level, I chose these relationships for exactly one reason only: they would ultimately prove that I was undeserving of love.  I created a self-fulling prophecy, which always came to fruition.  In a way, without ever knowing it, I sabotaged each and every one of my relationships before they had even begun.

It is my belief that a strong and healthy relationship must begin on equal footing.  Often, my relationships have not begun in this way.  Early on in the relationship, something was already going wrong.  I could see it, but I would not admit to it.  I thought that I could fight for love and win.  I thought I was deserving of this kind of love.  A love that is not freely given.  It is never right to begin a relationship thinking to yourself that you can fix the other person, that you can help them with their problems, that you can be the solution for them.  You cannot be.  No amount of love can do that.  Each one of us must first fix ourselves before we have a chance for a solid, long lasting, meaningful and loving relationship.  To think that the relationship itself or the love you bear for your partner can resolve problems is a fallacy.  To believe that you can fix someone through your love is not possible.  Not unless they come willingly and find their own solution through the love.  I see this now.  I saw it before only I denied myself the truth of it in order to find love.  The kind of love that I thought I deserved.  I was wrong.

Each of us is deserving of love.  Love is the glue that binds the universe.  Love is at the centre of all things.  Love cannot be denied.  Love is life and life is love.  They are one and the same.  You are life.  You are love.  You are worthy of love.  You are deserving of a strong and healthy love.  Do not settle for anything less.  Search your feelings, look deep inside of yourself, speak openly with your heart.  Seek the answers for yourself and if you find that your relationships are always a struggle, ask yourself if you feel that you are deserving of a special kind of love?  I can tell you one simple thing: you are.  You always were and you always will be.

This is probably the most deeply personal of my blog posts to date.  I am sharing this because I believe there is real value in sharing it.  I share my thoughts, not because I am searching for sympathy or empathy, I share my thoughts because I wish to make a difference.  If only one person should read this and it triggers a moment of realisation for them, then it is worthwhile.

Knowing what I know now, I am ready.  I am ready for the love that I deserve.  I am ready for the love of which I have been waiting my whole life.  My journey is my journey and I would not trade any of it, I would not change a single thing about it.  It is what has taught me the lessons.  It is what has brought me to here, to now.  For those that I have wronged because of my self belief in that I was undeserving of love, I say sorry and I ask your forgiveness.  We all learn.  That is the purpose of life.  We are evolving our souls.

We can never go back, we can only go on.  The one true path is the path of love.  Search inside of yourself, discover the love, discover your own one true path.  And know that the love you find there, is all that you deserve.

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