The Laws of Attraction

I blogged not long ago, slightly distraught with a sense of human hopelessness, about how I no longer believed in karma, in some sort of celestial intervention that insured that just because people were ‘good’, their life would be pleasant and agreeable things would happen to them.

As I always do, I read every comment left for me. If I’m honest, some made me angry, but, as is the status quo, most made me smile. One in particular I read at that time and didn’t think much further about until it popped into my mind as a full colour picture a few days later.

An anonymous comment said this…

Either you can play the victim, or you can acknowledge that yes, this happened, but it also happened to Tony and all the other people who knew him and who know you.

There IS such a thing as the Law of Attraction. As above, so below… as within, so without. What you think about, you bring about. So while the pain and the memories are there, try to focus on what you loved most about Tony, and you will attract more loving people and experiences into your life.

I’ve had alot of horrible shit happen to me too but I have to pick up the pieces somehow and keep living and learning.

 There’s probably a whole blog post in how much the first paragraph pissed me off. And as for the last paragraph… I freaking hate being patronised. And I’ve found the only thing that playing the “who’s got the biggest pile of crap” game leads to is everyone’s towers falling down and we all end up covered in shit.

The middle bit… and moved on. I filed it under ‘Good Begets Good, Think Happy Thoughts’ and dismissed it with a mental ‘But I already do that…’ and moved on.

And then, as happens on a continually increasing frequent basis, I had some kind of epiphany. And realized all over again that I am not, in fact, as smart as I happen to think I am.

Chatting via SMS to a guy I’d met in the treacherous waters of online dating, I happened to ask how many kids he had. I definitely wasn’t prepared for the answer I got back. Which was ‘seven’. And this guy was only 34 years old.

There are always deal breakers when you’re dating. And when you’re dating online, there has to be– how else do you sift through the myriad of possible men who may be nothing like what they say they are? It’s easy enough to call game over when you find out things like the person in question doesn’t like children, they use hardcore drugs, they’re only after sex or currently serving time in a penititary.

And once upon a my-mid-twenties, seven kids to two different women would have been well and truly enough to make me stay away.

But really, when it comes right down to it… is cutting off any further communication with someone just because they’ve got (way) more kids than you any different to backing away from a woman because her husband killed himself?

Not really. And the laws of attraction state, you get back what you put out into the Universe.

If that’s the truth– and really, who’s to say its not?– then, should I continue the way I am, I’ll find myself meeting people exactly like me. People who are too afraid of someone’s circumstances to even take the chance to get them to know them.

I’ll confess that I’m not particularly disappointed when communication with this guy fizzled out within the next couple of days. It turned out that we just had nothing much to say to each other. But at the very less I let it get to that point organically, naturally. Without cutting it off just because there was some fact of this person’s life that was scary and unfamiliar.

And that has to be a good thing. Because if I’m continually raving and hurting that my husband’s actions speak more to others than the person I am inside, while dismisses others on the facts of their past rather then who they are in the present, it’s only logical that I’m going to attract people who will do just that. Everyone’s got a past, no one is perfect… if I want people to stop expecting me to be, I have to accept the same from them.

With that in place, a core truth that’s taken me so long to learn, it doesn’t even feel surprising when the next person who comes along is almost farcically ‘imperfect’, if we’re going to count odds and ends and candlewax and things that don’t really matter.

And I know, that probably makes no sense to you at all.

But know for now that I’m smiling. It’s spring and my heaven scent garden is beginning to bloom…. and for now I’m smiling.