Rocketing down the cereal aisle at Whole Foods, I pass through a lovers’ breakfast debate.
“Oatmeal or cereal?”
He holds a box of oatmeal up for her inspection, awaiting a confirmation before the committed entry to the grocery cart.
It’s just a benign breakfast question (I’d go for the cereal, personally), but the comfortable intimacy weaving between the two fascinates and startles me into a state of curious perplexity.
I’ve never been that close to a lover to casually inquire about a breakfast preference. I’ve never lingered in the cereal aisle and shared a grocery cart of my food choices mingled with theirs. I haven’t created a unique universe with a person, a universe prompted into motion by magnetized attraction, heart-beating desire, hungry hormones, and a very human need for love and to be loved and to be loving.
I am just as baffled by the workings of the expanding universe as I am by the couple beside me debating oatmeal or cereal. The nonchalant normalcy exhibited in a simple question about the week’s breakfast choices astonishes me because it’s utterly foreign to my own questioning and questing heart.
As I scan the teeming overflow of colorful and non-high-fructose corn syrup free cereals, I wonder…am I supposed to want that? That is the romantic partnership, the routine couple excursion to Whole Foods on Monday evening. That is the man asking me to select a cereal. That is commitment and co-creating a life with a fellow breakfast eater. That is not what my heart is hammering after these days…and is that all right?
I spot my beloved Weetabix cereal, and pop that and my question into my grocery cart before sweeping off to the check-out line.
I lean against the cart and people-watch, and in the layering hums of shoppers and employees scurrying and hurrying and meandering through the structured hive of organic food, I sway back into soft reflections.
These days my life hums in a flurry of purposeful motion, and as I go and do, I am also intensely aware of a bundle of questions that I am living into, of all these serious contemplations on service, purpose, the human condition, our current chapter in global history, and love.
Always love.
My city commutes, my conversations with spirited seekers, and even my evening errands rotate around love reflections.
Though my life buzzes with happenings, I know that I am in a listening phase, I am in a transitional phase, a passing iteration instructing interests, healings, piquing ideas and curiosities. And in the listening, in the musing, I think about love because I believe love is the ultimate answer to any question.
I believe that every decision we make is either fear-reactive or love-responsive, and that love is the only way forward. And forward movement is the only path I want to go, and it’s the only way of healing, so I believe in choosing love, again and again, as the energy, as the core intention guiding me in my interpersonal relationships, my motions of going and doing.
I believe in choosing the love that dares to burn deeper in empathy, that allows a charitable, compassionate, generous view of humanity.
I believe in a thunderstorm-reckoning-love that secures boundaries of protection and channels high-frequency energy into the manifestation of consciousness-elevation action.
I believe in a fiery force of love that has teeth and will defend the higher cause, in a type of love that can lead us to walk away, especially to shield our own hearts and energetic well-being. I think this fuel of love recycles the pain and sustains our efforts in ensuring well-being for all.
And these love meditations rumble with me as I navigate the city that is the of Whole Foods park lot.
This is my here and now, and this is where I can show up in love.
I easily could look at this hot sea of cars and steady current of traffic and identify with the irritation, the over-whelm, the judgment that hisses to the surface. But the present moment is the battleground for consciousness, and while my activist-oriented self would savor and leap to unleash my built-up energy into a protest and a social justice cause, this is my present platform: Getting to my car and leaving this parking lot in a state of peace, and this is significant because in our interconnectedness, all of our decisions, intentions, motivations matter.
I think about the lovers in the cereal aisle and reshape the perception of the world painting in front of me. The cars are just cars, ego-shells carrying people, families, friends, lovers, people with dreams and aches, fears and sorrows, and joys and depths. Most people are hungering for the depths, are hungering to be seen, are hungering for a love.
Most people, myself included, get a little desperate and stressed in parking lots.
Breathe and flow.
Exiting the Whole Foods parking lot and slipping onto the main road home, I shift that compassionate human lens to my former romantic entanglements, and mostly, to me.
I know I am in a listening phase, and in my listening phase, I revisit and review the old conceptions and governing fears that influenced and impacted my behavior and actions and thoughts in romantic affairs. My idea of romantic love has been distinctively flavored by witnessing, growing up in, and absorbing particular peculiarities and dysfunctions that I may perceive as love and are also not guarantors of happiness, emotional respect, and overall well-being.
In my listening phase, I practice self-compassion and self-appreciation to befriend my humanness, and in this recognition and radical loving of self, I am beginning to grant space for my own struggles, imperfections, and fears, and give that grace and space to others, too. I no longer have rosy tinted glasses about romantic love. My partner will be flawed, and I am flawed, and our relationship will be challenging, because we are two human beings learning and loving to the best of our capacity.
This refreshed perspective comforts me because it’s an embracing compassion for the wide-ranging complexity that is being human, that is humanity.
So in my listening phase, as my musing single self flows in and out of Whole Foods, and my commutes around the city steer contemplations on love propelling forward the evolving collective story of humanity, I think about those lovers debating cereal or oatmeal. That mundane, brief exchange pulses in love-electric connection, and the witnessing expands my heart muscle to revel in all the ways love appears, and prompts me to be present in my own loving, my own learning on loving, and staying very open-hearted too in choosing love to guide through parking lots, cereal aisles, and moving my own story forward in love, too.