Shampoo Series – Taking it Slow?

Some friends of my roommate’s came by last night. She wasn’t in. She and her boyfriend had gone out to dinner. So, they waited about half an hour and made conversation with me. I don’t know Ross & Elizabeth very well, so we just chatted about the superficial obvious facts of life.

Of course, my latest news is Paul.

One of Ross’ first questions was, “So, you’re taking it slow, right?” as if this was clearly the best and most advisable course of action.

It’s funny. My horoscopes for several days now have been advising me to have the courage to break rules. I kinda figured it might have something to do with Paul and I, or maybe with work, but I still wasn’t quite clear what rules I might be advisedly breaking here.

Now I suspect it is that suspicious admonishment to , “Take it slow.”

Can I absolutely know that my life will be better if I “take it slow?”

Nope.

I married Marvin 11 days after our first date and I wouldn’t change a thing. I usually try to put people at ease after I tell them that by saying we had known each other for 5 years, and we had, but honestly? I don’t know what that has to do with it. It just makes other less daring people more comfortable with my life.

If you haven’t noticed, my life has been a lot about doing what feels intuitively right, not about forcing myself to follow standard advice about how to live.

Intuition is instantaneous.

I’m not saying I’m jumping ship this moment and moving in with Paul, though I might.

What I am saying is that I will act when I feel a sense of clarity about what to do next.

Sound familiar?

It should. That’s what this whole Shampoo Series is about:

We get clear and we act from that clarity.

Then something muddies the water.

Lather, rinse, repeat and we do it all again.

Clarity is not something we get and keep forever.

We keep having to clean the lens of perception. Wipe off both the rose-colored and the dusty beliefs, thoughts and misunderstandings. Get clear. Then act.

And I won’t act until I’m clear.

But once I’m clear, I can pretty much guarantee that someone – no, several someones – will be triggered by what I do. Whether I run off to live with Paul or call the whole thing off, the people with the opposite story are going to get their hackles up.

Well, isn’t that what happens in your life?

What do you live by?

Other people’s stories?

Your stories?

Or that inner sense of clarity?

It’s a no-brainer.

Love, Ann

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

               – The Bard, William Shakespeare