In the Meantime ( from Iyanla Vanzant book)

What do you do in the meantime? Somewhere in the back of your mind you know the day will eventually come when the relationship you are in become all you want. Or all that you want in a relationship will one day show up. The question remains, however, what do you do in the meantime? There’s a funny thing about love. It will find you in the most unusual circumstances, at the most unlikely times. Love will come upon you, throw its arm around you, and transform your entire existence. Unfortunately, most of us won’t recognize the experience or understand the impact when it’s happening. It’s like being in therapy. You keep talking, searching, questioning what’s going on with you and in you while being totally ignorant of the fact that you are being blessed. Perhaps it’s because love rarely shows up in the places that we expect it to or looks the way we expect it to look.

When you are not happy where you are and you are not quite sure if you want to leave or how to leave, you are in the meantime. It’s a state of limbo. You are hanging on, ready to let go, afraid to fall, not wanting to hurt yourself, afraid you will hurt someone else. In the meantime, you pray the other person will let go first so that you will not feel guilty.

The other person keep dropping hints, letting you know it’s time to go.  You deny it! Why? You don’t know why, but I can tell you that the meantime is fraught with don’t knows and can’t do’s.  Don’t know why I can’t go. Don’t know why I should stay. Don’t know where I’m going. Don’t know how I am going to get there, wherever there is. Ambivalence, confusion, reluctance, and paralysis are all the characteristics of the meantime. If you knew the answers to these questions you would be just fine. In the meantime, you are many things, fine is probably not one of them!

Life would be much easier if, when we hit a snag in a relationship, any relationship, we would stop, address it, and move ahead smoothly. The truth is, in most cases, we could do just that. The reality is, we don’t do it! We keep moving. We allow little insults to become raging angers, little arguments to become festering fueds, little pains to become deep wounds, and we keep moving. In many cases, we keep hurting. When the relationship at issue is an intimate, loving one, the attempt to move forward without addressing the pain only complicates matters, further poisoning the relationship.

How can I stay and not get hurt? How can I go without hurting? You cannot answer these questions if you are in pain. What you can do is make the effort to to discover the truth about love, because it is the only thing that can help you move through the experience. In the meantime, if we can remain loving ourselves and toward other people by staying in conscious and honest communication, a disruption, a snag, or delay in a relationship becomes a healing process. When we cannot, we engage in meantime behavior- hurting,  fighting, not telling the truth, and moving forward in confusion. Confusion begets confusion.

Life is all about love. Love is the only meaning of life.

Reality Bites!!!

THE SPLEEN MONOLOGUES by Jessica Zafra

 

 

I am often asked: What is your problem? Let me ask you the same question: What is your problem?

 

When you look at the mirror you feel a deep, unquenchable discontent because no matter what products or services you buy, you will never, ever look the way commercials and magazines say you should. The cosmetics, fashion, health and fitness industries are sustained by your eternal dissatisfaction and the pernicious self-loathing that is called “self-improvement.”

 

You work for a person you do not respect, whose main qualification is that he is related or somehow connected to the powers that be in your professional universe. You take orders from someone of lesser ability, who criticizes your work because he knows that you know he doesn’t deserve his position, and dammit, just because he can. The promotion that should’ve gone to you goes to someone whose ability to suck up the boss would shame the most powerful vacuum cleaner. You stay in a job hate, among people you can’t stand, because you have bills to pay and a lifestyle you have to maintain whether or not you actually like it.

 

You receive advice you don’t want from people who say they care about you and have your best interest at heart, but are actually using you to delude themselves that their lives are wonderful.

(They need you more than you need them, ever think of that? Without poor little you to give advice to, who would they be superior to?)

 

You are considered a loser because you refuse to compromise your standards and settle for whoever is willing and available. You are called immature by people who jumped onto the first warm body that happened along because they were afraid to be alone.

 

You are judged not of merits but on externals. Your clothes.  Your car.  Your looks.  Your possessions.

Your address. Your friends, the people you claim to be your friends, the people you think are your friends. The club you belong to. You are defined by the furnishings in your house, the model of your car, the version of your software, the size of your cell phone, the labels of your clothes, the restaurant you dine in, the television sitcoms you watch, the new spiritual philosophies you subscribe to. “ This is you,” the salesperson says with a cloying smile, holding up a product worth exactly one-fiftieth of its price, and somewhere in the back of your mind you know that this is not you, but you take out your credit card and bury yourself deeper in debt because you can’t afford not to buy what everyone else is buying. Better to be in hock than to be different. There is safety in numbers.

 

You are under pressure to follow trends which, the minute they become trends, are on their way to obsolescence. You are required to eat food that is supposed to make you live longer, but which is so tasteless you wonder why people would want to live longer. You get tired of being called Fatty, so you follow diets and exercise regimes to lose weight, when it is a fact of life that you will gain wall that weight back and more.

 

You see stupidity, self-delusion, and arrogance everywhere you turn.

When people say “Be Yourself.” They mean you should be more like them.

When they say “It’s okay to be different,” they neglect to add, “But not too different.”

 

And when you vent your anger, people shrug their shoulders and say, “That’s the way things are, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Between you and me. Im the HAPPY one.

In The Meantime…

“You know where you want to be, but you have no clue how to get there. You know exactly what you want in life, but what you want is nowhere in sight. Perhaps your vision is unclear; your purpose still undefined. On top of it all, your relationships, particularly your romantic relationships are failing. If these scenarios feel familiar way down in the deepest part of your gut- then you my dear , are smack dab in to the middle of the meantime…

No one can prepare you or help you find what you are looking for. What you need is LOVE, not romance. Love, not more money, Love, not new car. Love is the only thing that can make the meantime worthwhile. Once you find love, ture self-love, and unconditional love for everyone all the time, things will look, feel, and be a lot better. The question is: What do you do in the meantime?”

By: Iyanla Vanzant (In The Meantime)