Waiting For Someone Else To Change

Waiting For Someone Else To Change
by Julie Redstone

We live in a world of relationships in which we are always asking for things and giving things, more of one and less of the other depending on who the ''other'' is in our life. With some it is very easy to be generous, tolerant, and forgiving – to create leeway in our hearts for them to make mistakes or to do things that we would rather not have them do. We find a space within ourselves in which we can accept them as they are. With others, their trespassing across a line of behavior, word, or thought – a line that we have drawn inwardly and often outwardly – causes a prickliness in us and a feeling of being easily wounded - a feeling of finding certain behaviors intolerable or of needing to run away because we feel disappointed or hurt. Then, in our hearts and often outwardly, we ask that they be different so that we know how to be with them and so that our relationship can continue without so much difficulty. There is a lot of pain in wanting others to be different. There is the pain of feeling dependent upon someone who is not dependable. There is the pain of feeling helpless to create the change that we desire. And most of all, there is the pain of feeling locked-in to our own responses so that we cannot react differently. For if we could react differently, then the behavior of another would not be a source of concern to us. This mix of different kinds of distress can be acute or it can be longstanding, sometimes lasting for years or even for a lifetime. There is often a yearning to be free of the entire situation and an inability to know how. In the corner of our awareness we know that more love and tolerance is needed, but have difficulty finding these, despite our knowledge. There is a bridge that it is possible to build that opens up greater love – a bridge built out of a truth we can recognize that enables us to be free. It is a bridge of compassion that is composed of two things: on the one side, the recognition that the ''other'' is doing the best that they can, all of the time, given the limitations that they face within themselves. These limitations are part of their inheritance – part of the burden that they carry through life, and they can only be put down when they are ready to be put down. Recognition that another is doing the best that they can defines one aspect of the bridge to greater love.

**I found this bit of advice everyone could use in their life. I liked it, so I'm posting it on my own web blog page....