The Grace of Stumbling

I have something to admit. I fall in love. A lot. Like almost daily. Chances are, if you're reading this, I have been madly in love with you at some point, and I've tried my hardest to make you fall in love with me. While the thought of falling love is theoretically beautiful, the action of being in love with so many people is, quite simply, impractical. Hear me out on this one: It is exhausting. Those nascent phases of being in love are tough. There's all the planning, the extra attention to details, the wildly alert conversations. When I first fall in love with someone, it is all-consuming. Trust me. I'm just coming down from a falling-in-love high, and the hangover has been nasty.

I've often wondered what changes. I don't fall out of love (I still very much love all of you), but what happens when I stop having those proverbial butterflies? This weekend, though a melange of related events, it hit me. Everything became strikingly clear, and I wondered why I'd never realized this. The love changes. It grows into something deeper, more meaningful, and less butterfly-laden.

The revelation, of course, is that we are all human. We all come with flaws, we all have pasts that sometimes keep us up at night, and we all are constantly searching for someone who understand us.

When we fall in love, it's because there is still some spark of intrigue, some bit of mystery. But once we learn some of those flaws, we see that we don't need to be in love. We just need to love. It's not always about the butterflies. Sometimes it's about the tears, the drunken confessions, and the overflowing emotions that we all carry around with us. We are constantly told to keep so many of our fears and worries hidden away that when the opportunity comes to show who we really are, it becomes nearly impossible to not yell them from the tops of our lungs. "I cheated on my first wife!" "I am miserable in my job!" "I embezzled millions of dollars!" (Clearly, these are all fictitious scenarios. No one actually said any of these things this weekend, at least to my knowledge.)  We just want to let it all out to someone who may also be feeling those butterflies for us. It's not that we're in love. It's that we have found some reflection of ourselves in someone else. Perhaps it's actually our flaws that connect us.

Somewhere in the events of this weekend, I came to the same conclusion about nearly every single person I've fallen in love with. I've fallen in love with all of them because I could see something in them that I knew was also in me. The ones who have stuck are all still there because we showed each other our flaws and loved each other all the more for it. So, I suppose this is my wish for all of you and the reason why I found it necessary to write this so quickly and without my normal weeks of editing. We might fall in love with people for their strengths, but we grow to love them for their flaws.

Now that I think about it, maybe that's what the butterflies are… maybe they are secrets excitedly fluttering around just waiting to get out. It's hard carrying the weight of your regrets, your fears, your doubts, so why do it alone?  Carry each other's skeletons.

Notice the next time you fall in love with someone for what you don't know -- then embrace the messy, crazy, whole love that comes from knowing.


"Dear Human: You’ve got it all wrong. You didn’t come here to master unconditional love. That is where you came from and where you’ll return. You came here to learn personal love. Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love. Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love. Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling. Demonstrated through the beauty of… messing up. Often. You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are. You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous. And then to rise again into remembering. But unconditional love? Stop telling that story. Love, in truth, doesn’t need ANY other adjectives. It doesn’t require modifiers. It doesn’t require the condition of perfection. It only asks that you show up. And do your best. That you stay present and feel fully. That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU. It’s enough. It’s Plenty." ~Courtney Walsh
A special thanks to my work wife for showing me this quote at the exact moment I needed to see it.


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