'Are you my son from the future?'
I typed, 90% joking and 10% serious, stunned by the depth of synchronicity I'd just experienced. For a long moment, the cursor blinked silently.
'No. At least...I don't think so. What an odd thing to ask.'
He replied. I sat for a beat, confused. For a split-second, I seriously thought I might be getting Punk'd. He'd added me on Facebook, this typing stranger - and the stranger had a name, and that name was the same name that I had fancifully chosen for my theoretical son in the future. The stranger also had the same surname as me, out of all the surnames in the world wide web, his and mine were the same.
But he'd felt it too: the weirdness.
The co-incidence, the synchronicity:
Hey,
I don't think we know each other. Facebook suggested I add you, which I usually ignore but then you were a writer like me and had same name as me (my real name is Lauren... kidding)so I took notice. (I'm a writer so I'm a sucker for fate!)
One year would pass without my meeting my synchronistic stranger - my silver friend - face to face.
In the interim, I went on a string of bad dates and wound up in an emotionally devoid relationship. As my heart grew heavy with the weight of this binary pairing, my Facebook friendship fizzled out.
I awoke one morning, several months after my leaden relationship had ended, with the synchronistic stranger on my mind. The memory of him appeared from nowhere and was persistent, like the mental note of an important job that I hadn't gotten around to yet.
Text him, my inner voice encouraged.
Just text him, find out how he is... My mind repeated after my non-compliance.
'Hey, how are you? Long time no speak! Fancy catching up for that drink we always talked about? x.'
I propelled my text into the airwaves.
The synchronistic stranger, upon receiving my electronic smoke signal, felt unsure if it was meant for him since we hadn't spoken in so long.
Uncertain whether to text back, he stood up from his seat to go get coffee from the on-board cafe of the train he was riding. He ordered a cappuccino and paid the server; her name tag read 'Lauren'. It was all the prompt he needed.
In his text reply, he told me that since we had first spoken, he had been working abroad for almost the whole year. How strange, he pointed out, that I should be compelled to text him only on the very day that he was traveling home to the city that we shared.
*
Three years later, we are still in love.
The synchronistic stranger became my silver soul mate. I know it today, as I knew it the day that the one-in-seven-billion name requested me as a friend.
At first, I thought I had just been extremely lucky that he and I touched each other's lives, but with all the bizarre co-incidences involved in our meeting, I came to think that it was more than luck- it's as if we had been magnetic; sending out a signal that was in alignment with each other alone. I could no more change or avoid it, than if it were a law of nature.
'It'll come along when you least expect it,' my mother had told me about love. She was dead right. As soon as I focused on sorting myself out, getting my career and health in order, focusing on my family relationships and friendships, and chasing my dreams, the magnet force strengthened. As I worked on polishing my life from gray to silver, it seemed to increase the magnetic force of love- completely out with my awareness or conscious choice- until one day love just...showed up. Totally out of the blue.
So my conclusion is this: the more you polish your silver self- the more you work towards your dreams, your happiness- you develop an energy that pulls loving people and situations to you.
That's honestly the only dating advice that's ever worked for me. I didn't do anything to look for love, I just worked on myself and love turned up.
Contrary to much of the dating advice out there, I never had any luck when I tried to control my love life by doing stuff that ought to attract a man (according to the books!). The amount of required effort and jumping through hoops grew exponentially, probably because in my pursuit of love, I had chosen to be the pursuer- the one making the effort: I had chosen the idea that love was something I had to hunt down, search for and work at. I was prepared to accommodate, to compromise, to bend over backwards. And because I believed that about relationships, 'unavailable' men turned up, to grant me my unconscious wish of fruitless pursuit.
Stop trying to find a relationship.
Stop trying to improve the relationship you already have.
Reject the notion that you have to try- it is the first step towards allowing love to happen.
Work on you, and in doing so, love will find you.
Let yourself be found, rather than trying to be the finder.
So here it is in elaborated form- my anti-dating advice. Nothing you read in what follows will teach you how to find love- but I hope that it will teach you how to let yourself be found.
Accept that being in a relationship is not the skeleton key to happiness.
A relationship in itself will not make you happy if you are unhappy with everything else in your life. Your happiness is your internal dominion, it is a property of your consciousness and your worldview- it is not a property of anything in your external world, including a person.
Your happiness is a choice that you continually make about the sort of person you want to be and how you want to experience the world. Being in a relationship will not automatically fill your life with happiness if you are not already familiar with happiness. If you constantly focus on what's lacking in your life - for example, a relationship- then it's your outlook that needs work, not your marital status. It is not anyone's job to make you happy.
A happy relationship is the product of two content people. A happy relationship will not arise from one person who is unhappy and the other who is tasked with entertaining and fixing the unhappy one. So how does one get happy? One way is to...
Practice finding love in other things besides a new relationship.
Make a conscious effort to cultivate feelings of love in your life. You have the choice to do this in equal measure with the choice to focus on the negative. Which will you choose?
Know and retain that your relationships are not your parents' relationship.
'My parents are divorced so I find it difficult to form relationships.'
At first, this sounds like a smart observation, but is it really true? By deciding that your parents' relationship equals doom for you, you are choosing a limiting belief based on something that is out with your control, and if you feel you can't control your relationship destiny, then you deny your own power to change it.
Of course your parents influence your emotional development, but so does your friends, relatives, the era that you live in and the media; even after all of those influences have moulded you, you are still responsible for your own beliefs and your own choices about relationships.
Don't dis-empower your ability to make good choices for yourself. The fate of your parents' relationship in no way guarantees the fate of your relationships- unless you believe it does.
Recycle plastic, not exes.
There can be all sorts of reasons why we recycle past relationships. Rarely do we find something more than what we started out with. Unless you are really sure that your ex is the one for you and you are fully committed to seeing it through, resist the urge to re-tread old ground.
Forgive your ex, forgive yourself, move on. Your self-esteem and emotional wellbeing is too high a price to pay, and in reliving your past, you open up the potential for suffering which only serves to plop you back onto the greyscale.
The way you feel about yourself teaches other people how to treat you.
Imagine your thoughts and feelings about yourself are being transmitted to everyone that you come into contact with (because they are!), and that whatever you transmit informs how the world responds to you. Could you reflect upon yourself with more love and kindness? Could you quit being so hard on yourself and talking yourself down? If you want someone else to love you, demonstrating that you believe you are likeable, at least, is required.
Selfishly follow your dreams.
There is nothing more attractive than a person who is in the throes of passionately working towards their own personal awesomeness. Lose yourself in the blissful pursuit of your dreams. No excuses, guilt or apologies are required.
Do something completely unselfish.
Perform an act of kindness and let it put a bit of magic into your life. Let your capability for kindness also remind you that you are powerful: powerful in the sense that you can harness and dispense an infinite supply of love to anyone, at any moment. Loving kindness propagates itself: where it is dished out, it is also received.
Change your life 'til your hearts content but always accept yourself as you are.
Go for it! Change your life, move away, start a new career, ditch an old habit, struggle and cry and get angry and go back to the drawing board...and through it all, accept yourself. Accept the parts of you that are changing. Accept the parts of you that are staying the same. Accept the parts of you that feel complete. Accept the parts of you that are still under construction. Just give yourself permission to accept yourself for who you are.
When you are at peace with yourself, your feelings, your good days and bad days, you will realize something very important...that you are whole and perfect as you are. Not in need of another/better half, not lacking, but a fully polished, complete and assembled magnet, cultivating and attracting love by simply being your silvery self.
That's what I did and it worked. "
- Lauren Robertson
" This post makes me happy for so many reasons. And one, is because these happy fateful coincidences that we both write about, was exactly how Lauren and I came to find each other. Lauren was one of the first silvers I ever discovered through blogging, right back at the very beginning, and that positivity and reassurance has been a major contributing factor as to what has kept me going.
Life truly is about finding people you connect with and who understand you on a higher level, and you should never ever underestimate the power of just one conversation with someone on the same wavelength as you. After all, if fate is as we believe, then you will always attract people who are spiritually in tune with you, you just have to open your eyes and realize it. "Scarlet-Ophelia
Want to hear more from Lauren?
Catch me and more of my off the wall, esoteric musings and advice over at: www.FromAngelsToZen.com
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