Take Back Your Life!

True Love Can Never Be Erased

This weekend I watched the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Not sure how I missed it ten years ago, but my library’s DVD collection gave me a second chance to view it.

I loved it.

Creative. Clever. Complicated. Compelling.

Without giving the entire movie away, it’s a maze-like romantic tale about the staying power of true love. You can try to erase it, but true love will always try to find its way back into your life. In the case of the movie, this love was between two people. Outside of this movie, this love can also be between a person and the things in life that make his or her heart sing. I’m sure you’ve heard of Thoreau’s quote: Most men lead quiet lives of desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. And he wrote that back in the 1800’s.

If we try to repress our true loves, we end up repressing ourselves. I am convinced that much of the brawls that break out around the world happen because the people involved have been divorced from the activities that would make their hearts sing. You may have noticed that most brawls happen to younger folks in their twenties. It’s a weird decade for many. The one decade I would never want to repeat.

Somehow in my twenties I got disconnected from everything I loved in life. It didn’t happen over night, it just became more apparent when I graduated from college and had to carve my own path through life and wasn’t sure how. Young adults go from being told what to do, to being held responsible for their lives. The endless waiting and preparation to do most anything can stifle a person’s natural ability to just go for it, like I did as a young girl.

The best advice we can give the young is to say at an early age, “Just go for it.” It gets harder to do that once you’ve been told, “Don’t go for it, until you have all your ducks lined up.” 

Mistakes are part of the process and signify that a person has the guts to try new things. Telling young kids to not make mistakes creates older people afraid to try new things for fear of making a mistake or not doing it perfectly. Golly, we ought to be encouraging mistakes and using that as a marker of progress.

In my twenties, I didn’t know which direction to go in. I was lost. I was scared. I was unfulfilled.

Fortunately, I reconnected with true love in my thirties when I took up singing, something I’d done informally as a child when I sang around my home. I sang in my cabin at camp. I sang when I walked through the woods. I sang in the shower.

Once I got re-engaged with life through my singing — writing, painting, biking, hiking and acting quickly followed. Loving your life and being loved by your love is contagious. Once I regained the loves of my life, I vowed to never lose them again, to never stand idly by and watch someone rip them out of my arms.

What true love have you repressed in the name of responsibility or conformity or reality? And found again?

Want to tell us below? Love to hear. Muse thanks, G.