Having Recently Come Through a Relationship Crisis, I'm Reflecting on My Journey from Chaos ➡ Clarity
Even in my 60s, it hurt like a motherf*cker to have my heart broken.
Life gets complicated
It’s become even more so as I’ve grown into maturity.
That’s a fancy way of saying I’m getting older. Whatever. 🙄
Nearly three years ago, I was happy to be part of a thriving partnership within which I felt loved, appreciated, and valued. Even more importantly, it allowed me to express the immense love and adoration for the woman I’d given my heart to six years earlier. It fulfilled me to do so in little ways — bringing her flowers, holding hands in public, never failing to open a car door for her, and bringing her coffee in bed each morning.
I moved to the Pacific Northwest with her after she retired from teaching, where she built a new home. She’d invited me to join her, and we made it our home together. We adopted our dear, sweet Kona — a chocolate brown Labradoodle. A year later, I knew it was over, and it broke my heart.
There was no drama, betrayal, or fighting. She was unwilling to discuss or work on the issues that shaped her decision to move on without me beside her.
To date, I still don’t know why she ended our relationship.
In the poetic words of Don Henley,
"It's been over two years for me, and I'm still not quite myself."
So, I moved on, too.
I’ve been there before
After enduring two marriages and subsequent divorces, the aforementioned six-year relationship, four wonderful adult children, and 13 grandchildren, I chose to remain solo.
Instead of pursuing romantic relationships, I opt for plutonic relationships with women. I have two female besties, and I’ve found it beneficial that they have similar mindsets.
I've always had higher-quality relationships with women—not so much with guys. I’m not certain why. Apart from online friends, I don’t have any male friends, buddies, or chums.
I think I’m far too introverted for that.
How I rebuilt my life
After much exploration and experimentation over the past two years, I settled on five simple daily practices that completely transformed my relationship with myself and the world around me.
What began as desperate attempts to find peace amidst an increasingly noisy and disheartening world gradually evolved into a path toward the clarity I sought and craved.
The five practices I settled into weren’t complicated or time-consuming. They didn’t require special equipment or even a specific belief system.
What it looks like
For me, it looks like this:
Moving from the continual mental noise to a calm, centered presence regardless of my environment.
Trading overwhelming complexity for meaningful simplicity.
Shifting from self-criticism to genuine self-acceptance.
Exchanging fear-based decisions for authentic self-expression.
Switching from treating my body as an afterthought to honoring it as my home.
The five daily practices that created this transformation and that I practice daily include:
Sitting in solitude
Embracing simplicity
Engaging in kindness
Cultivating self-expression
Respecting the body
“These practices changed more than what I do each day or who I am; they helped me change my response to the world around me.”
I wrote about the practices for two years
You might think I produced a tome of a thousand pages, but no.
Can you imagine how mind-numbingly boring that would be? A guy going on for hundreds of pages at a time about crying himself to sleep? Mein Gott, I’d have shot myself first!
Instead, I journaled for over two years to capture my experiments and finally culled them to 56 US letter-sized pages. In the coming days, when I place them in Atticus, a pre-publishing program I’ll use to publish the paperback mini-book via Amazon’s KDP program, the resulting book will have less than 100 printed pages.
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