My husband wrote to me yesterday from work on email.
What are you doing tomorrow?
I replied without batting an eyelid….
….one-for-one call at 8 am, Year of Inquiry group from 9-10:30 am, gym workout or bike ride 11-12:30 pm, coaching call from 1-2:30 pm, individual session 3-4 pm, Summer Camp group call 5-6:30 pm.
I then continued creating my Peace Talk podcast on Competition.
(It was about fun juicy parts of competition–and maybe not what you’d expect me to say. Let me know if competition ever works for you, I’d love to hear your stories, and you can hear one of mine on this episode).
Yeah, I guess that’s a pretty full day, I thought.
Nothing that unusual.
Tuesdays roll like that lately.
Mondays are more creative-type days. I try not to schedule too many sessions with people. Although I still had a few.
Even so, I was still working at 10:35 last night on the podcast.
Then, it occurred to me.
Tomorrow’s my wedding anniversary.
Oh!
I went and found my husband, who had been home a few hours.
“Did you ask me earlier today about my schedule tomorrow because it’s our anniversary?”
Yes. He took the day off.
Hilarious.
We laughed about my schedule, and how it never occurred to me that it was 7/7 and doing something special might be fun.
And it was over.
Now….some people might say that sounds very unromantic. But weare planning on going out for a late dinner.
The thing is, the freedom and flexibility we have with each other is incredible.
Not having expectations about what should happen, or shouldn’t happen, is the sweetest ease in relationship.
Until.
Shouldn’t he care more that I completely forgot about our anniversary? Shouldn’t he have planned on taking a day off a bit earlier, so I could clear some of my day perhaps?
Yeah.
This is a little too smooth, easy and flexible!
Ha ha, I am chuckling already….but let’s take a look at this flip-flopping mind and all it’s crazy perceptions.
Who would I be if I didn’t have the thought that anything should happen, but I let myself have fun thinking about what would be most pleasurable?
I might ask him to share breakfast and being together for 30 minutes outside at the backyard picnic table on a summer morning.
Rather than disappointment, or starting to think the day could have been planned better or improved….
….or falling into that easy position of being a helpless critical victim….I might be much more creative.
Maybe I’ll ask him on a short walk between 4 and 5 pm.
Instead of “this should be this/that” I’d imagine what sounds sweet.
I turn those flare-up thoughts all back around and return to appreciation for what is here. Easy, light, no obligation. A way of relating that is about freedom.
“What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a thing, a situation, as it really is and not as you imagine it to be, and to give it the response it deserves. You cannot love what you do not even see. And what prevents you from seeing? Your concepts, your categories, your prejudices and projections, your needs and attachments, the labels you have drawn from your conditioning and from your experiences. Seeing is the most arduous thing a human can undertake. For it calls for a disciplined, alert mind, whereas most people would much rather lapse into mental laziness than take the trouble to see each person and thing anew in present-moment freshness.” ~ Anthony DeMello in The Way To Love pg. 138