Love Can Be Found
By Donna Davidage
Love is a many-splendored thing and comes in many forms. For some interesting reason, love can spend years in our life looking like pain and drama when in fact true love is never that. The challenge is living in true love.
What the yogis and meditators aspire to is a state of non-attachment and non-desire. Behind the veil of our attachments and desires lies a door to contentment and acceptance of things. Many famous people on being interviewed remark on how self-accepting they become after age 50. “If I only knew then what I know now!” is easy to say, as is the old “hindsight is always 20/20,” but the truly exciting journey of life is unraveling and discovering these doors that take us to the higher place of contentment in love. These famous people aren’t so different from many of us when it comes to this. I have also heard: “The 40s are the old age of youth, the 50s are the youth of old age.” Ah, what an interesting and fun truth; we are no longer young but we are in that young phase of growing into old age.
I remember when I was in my early 20s really looking up to my sister, who is 12 years older, and her husband. They had met in college and he seemed so cool to me. When I had visited them in California during the summers, very exciting for an East Coast teenage girl, he seemed so wise and understanding, such a good counselor about life and love. So when I received the phone call from my sister telling me he was leaving her, it was as much a shock to me as to her. I was disillusioned and newly engaged myself. Love just seemed like this unclear mystery.
It took my sister until she was 52 to meet the man who would become her life partner. For years they lived in their own homes, saw each other weekends, and were content in their careers — he a well-accomplished marine biologist essentially married to a career he loved, she a dedicated school teacher. When they announced plans to purchase a house together, I was surprised that they had actually taken that move. It seemed the next stage as they entered their senior years together.
My sister is now retired at 64, and her partner probably never will, not for lack of money but for love of work. Their lives mesh well. She travels to exotic places of the sea where he may have a conference but also is busy with her life and friends when he is out to sea for a month or so doing what he loves. And I still look up to her and love her so.
As I grow older I see how love takes so very many forms. So many women I speak to had to learn through unsatisfying relationships before they could grow into satisfying ones – okay, myself included. So many men also had to work on themselves, just like us women, to become fit for a healthy relationship.
Of course this also is a huge reflection of where we are with ourselves and why things like yoga, meditation, and therapy can help us figure out why things just aren’t working. When I studied acting years ago at the Neighborhood Playhouse there was a wonderful teacher named Richard Pinter who came into class the first day and asked us why we wanted to be actors. People had varying answers but none gave the one he was looking for. “You become an actor” he said, “because you want to give love or get love.” I think for me that was true. Every audition was like looking for the approval of the authority figure, the parents you weren’t quite sure approved of you. For me that was no fun and I was a pretty bad auditioner, but I really enjoyed the actual work of re-enacting life, love, and human relationships and situations. It is fascinating as an exploration.
At the same time that I began studying acting I also discovered Kundalini Yoga. These two tools became a pathway for the inner exploration -- seeking to understand life -- and of course if we want to understand life we’d better want to understand love.
I have often thought of Yoga as a metaphor for life, starting with how we approach ourselves and then others. Yogi Bhajan, who became my spiritual teacher and yoga guide, was very into helping us understand the difference between men and women, like two different species. He said men were 60 percent ego, 40 percent little boy (or vice versa, I am not quite sure, but you get the idea) and very insecure, that women were meant to be graceful and secure, and were never to try to meet a man on his level, especially when arguing.
There was much I learned from this man, the teacher who came into my life when I, the student, needed him. He gave us tools to really feel and understand our uniqueness and greatness and to understand love and life better. “Where there is a question there is no Love, where there is Love there is no question” was one of his great love quotes.
This past New Year’s shed an amazing light on love after 50 for me. My husband and I were placed at a table with two other couples at the local restaurant of the northern Maine town of 700 people in which we own an historic family home, Our life there is quite a contrast to our life in New York City, and I love the community.
This night’s experience was itself a contrast between these two worlds. Three of the four people who sat with us had lost their significant other within the last year; all had been with them for a long time, as much as 34 years. One man was the local postmaster, my age, who had lost his wife three months earlier.
I remember well the day last fall when a friend came to our door to cancel a dinner date with us. He and his wife -- in their 50s, like me -- ran a restaurant and catering business. I thought he was declining the dinner because a job, though unlikely on short notice, had popped up. Instead he said: “Anna is dead.” We knew this woman had had two hip replacements and open-heart surgery fairly recently, but she seemed to be doing well enough, and we had just seen her the night before at their restaurant. She had a heart attack driving home from picking up medication at the pharmacy, and hit a tree. The whole community was shocked that this 52-year-old woman was gone. More than 1,000 showed up at the wake in this town of 700 people. Once again I learned a lot about love.
Fast forward to New Year’s Eve. The postmaster is at dinner with a lovely woman I had known for years. The other man at the table had lost his his wife, who worked at the town office and had herself dropped dead of a heart attack. The postmaster was 65 years old and so was his date, whose personal history I did not know, though she spoke of sons and world travels — a very interesting woman, These two motorcycled, and were heading out on a cruise to Cuba in March. The woman with the postmaster asked my husband and me about our age difference. I am 52, my husband is 42. We were married when I was 48. She said she was almost 60; she looks great, and was relieved to hear of our age difference. She said it made her feel better about her new relationship. Yet these aren’t really new relationships, they’ve just taken on a new description, a deeper connection. Though the postmaster spoke with my husband a bit about the strangeness of finding love so quickly, my husband sensed the man’s need for permission, and granted it.
This evening amazed and inspired me. I have single friends in New York who have not found love in their mid-years and on into their 50s and older. Yet in this little tiny town these people had found love once again and quickly. It reminded me that love can be found anywhere, any time. The 65-year-old woman at our table said she had learned from a life-threatening illness that the most important thing was kindness and not to hold grudges. “And so,” she said, “what I realized about my new beau is that he may have his faults, but the one thing he is is kind.”
What we look for in young love is not always as wise as what we look for in mature love. And the wonder of it is that the universe may give it to us so easily and in places we never suspected, places right at our doorsteps practically — as long as we stay open to the possibility.
Donna Davidage has lived in New York City since 1985 and is mostly known as a yoga teacher, though she loves to write and has done some articles on yoga. She spends her summers in Maine at her family’s historic home where she runs Sewall House Yoga Retreat with her Swedish-born husband.
www.sewallhouse.com
