Everybody Hurts, Sometimes

Everyone has hurt someone in their lives, somewhere down the line.  It's one of the few absolutes that can be said both with confidence in its verity and with empathy for the many who have experienced its implications.

The proclivity to get lost in the past is a not-uncommon fault in my personal makeup.  My mother tells me that I am a peace-maker.  This seems about right.  I'm not saying I don't have a temper.  You may rest assured that the German-Irish in me is feisty and ready to rumble at a moment's notice.  (Usually, however, that energy gets channeled into exercise and board games.  Ruthlessness is not a bad quality in one's Scrabble opponent.)  I like to think things through, sometimes to exhaustion.  It is unlikely that I cannot eventually see another person's point of view, given enough input and time to ruminate upon it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but as we age it is only natural that one looks back on the history of their lives and judges themselves--whether harshly or gently, the judgment is there.  I spent a great deal of my youth engaged in relationship after relationship, on a (let's be candid here--it was fairly) ruthless quest for The One.  I used to agonize in each case--"Is this it?  If not, should I waste any more of my time and/or my partner's time?" In 1999, one family friend commented that I had too many "rules" (things that I would not stand for in a mate).  In 2006, my relatives started to get antsy about me ever settling down.

When I was 19, I visited a palm reader in Manchester (England).   He told me at the time that I would meet my husband to be at a very young age, and then marry him when I was much, much older.  I met Romeyn not too long after that.  However, I didn't make the connection.  Romeyn was my friend, and (more to the point) married to his first wife at the time.  Palmistry has resulted in some interesting coincidences, if not outright revelations in my personal experience. 

I am 18 years older than that ridiculously young nineteen year old, trembling in front of a palm reader in that little hole-in-the-wall across the sea.  In those years, I have hurt others, been hurt, run away from home, come back to New York, and re-met the man who become my husband in June of 2009.  As Karma goes, mine is not the cleanest.  My soul, however, is at peace. Regardless of the errors of the past, the beauty of the present more than makes up for the Karmic debt.  I felt that this would be the case when Romeyn and I decided to get married.  This is why one of our songs in the wedding was "Something Good" from "The Sound of Music."

"Somewhere in my youth and childhood, I must have done something good!"