Parallel Tracks

Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead.
~Adele/Daniel Dodd Wilson

These words were written out of pain and brokenness.  They were written out of disappointment, rejection, heartbreak, and suffering.  Sometimes life is like that.  Sometimes it really does hurt.  Anytime there is brokenness or loss, all of us struggle to find relief and healing.  It is part of the human condition.  All of us will and do experience times and seasons where life just doesn’t go the way we would like.
 
But those seasons don’t have to last forever.  Unfortunately, some people choose to live in those seasons forever.  Perhaps not knowing that they can grow into a new season because they don’t know how.  It is easy when we are in one of those seasons of doubt and despair to think that they will never end.  But they can end.  Part of the answer is us making a conscious choice to acknowledge the pain, to find an understanding of it, and to grow from it.

Life and love, relationships with ourselves and others, are often messy.  Nothing will ever be perfect or just the way we want it.  So many of our disappointments in life come from having expectations that are not realistic and set us up for frustration and pain.  When we can acknowledge and accept that sometimes–even at the same time that things are good–disappointing things can still happen to us. 

There is an author that we both appreciate very much who used the illustration of a train on track and how we tend to look at our lives as if there is one single track with good days and bad days, good moments and bad moments, good experiences and bad experiences one after the other.  But the author says that we are really on parallel tracks-that the good happens with the bad and the bad with the good at the same time.  When we understand and except this principle it can change the way we see our lives and the world.  But that always with the good there will be something that just isn’t perfect.  And even more importantly, always with the bad, there will be things that are right and are good.

Just last night Michael received a letter in the mail that brought him great joy.  But moments later, received a phone call about a situation that brought him great frustration.  It was very easy to allow the frustrating situation to overwhelm the feeling of joy that he had just had.  But after a short time of disappointment and anger he remembered the contents of the good letter and made a conscience choice to focus on that and not on the disappointment that enabled him to also begin to focus on a solution that could resolve the frustrating issue and allow him to take action to resolve it. 

Sometimes it lasts in love-and life-and sometimes it does hurt instead.  But the hurt doesn’t have to last.  The disappointment doesn’t have to stay.  The frustration doesn’t have to endure.  When we understand that, then life and its inevitable frustrations won’t be so bad.