Saying: “I love you.”
And holding the door, putting down the phone, setting the table, cleaning the dishes, picking up the kids, making the bed, helping prep dinner, baking a surprise desert, giving free massages, calling just because, giving a compliment, sharing a vulnerability, thoughtfully replying to messages, randomly showing affection—all with a big smile on your face…
Both communicate love.
But in powerfully different ways.
Want to learn how to become shielded from the unsolicited, hateful, derogatory critiques of others? Stamp this onto your brain:
Don’t accept criticism from people you wouldn’t go to for advice.
And if the answer is ever, “Yes”—you would go to this person for advice—then it’s important to reflect on the following:
(1) Is this the best person for you to be going to for advice? People who give advice in hateful, derogatory, negative ways may cause more harm to our path forward than benefit.
(2) If the answer is still yes, then, assuming there is anything constructive in their feedback, we must train our minds to surgically remove the gems from the emotional weight that burdens and collapses in on what’s said.
Because here’s the bottom line: feedback won’t always come in a pretty package.
And if we can learn how to accept what’s useful, how to disregard what (and who) is not, and how to keep ourselves in mentally healthy places so we can conduct criticism surgery with precision and poise at even a moment’s notice—our growth will become inevitable.
Worth noting about bridges: it takes effort from two sides.
You can construct a bridge a majority of the way from one side towards the other—but, without the consent from the other side—the bridge will remain incomplete.
And an incomplete bridge isn’t a bridge at all.
It’s an untravellable construction site.
How hopeful or desperate you might be for the bridge to be completed is irrelevant.
What’s relevant is the other side’s reciprocated response.
Without that, we might as well build our bridge(s) elsewhere.
Because untravellable construction sites don’t do anybody any good.
Especially not those who commit all of their resources to doing the constructing.
You know what hurts more than doing that painful thing now?
Doing that painful thing later.
It’ll be the same painful thing, but add to it all of the painful thinking between now and then and stack it all on your shoulders?
Yeah, I don’t know who needs to hear this, but just do that painful thing now.
Your shoulders could do without all of that extra weight.
Speeding up when you’re busy is like:
When you’re busy, unlocking productivity happens from slowing down.
Not the opposite.
It can be easy to take our loved ones for granted.
Especially when they seamlessly become a part of our daily lives.
Like running water, our internet connection, and the roof over our heads—we soon enough just expect them to be there when we wake up in the morning.
And the more that becomes the expectation—the less gratitude we’re likely to show.
Until eventually, we show no gratitude at all.
Until suddenly, we start letting stupid small things take control of our minds and turn what was once gratitude for wonderful miracles into generally misguided feelings of spite, frustration, and disregard.
And for no other reason than because we forgot.
And slowly, slowly—our forgetfulness becomes the very reason that fresh love turns stale.
Just as surely as the fresh fruit that sits in our fridge for too long will go stale—so too will the unattended relationships.
We must learn to keep breathing fresh life into what’s at risk of expiring.
Because love, no matter how strong it starts out, can always become stale with time.