As we continue on in this series, begun the other day, we're going to need to talk about all of it: the bad, the good and the ugly. There are so many problems combat veterans and their partners face, and to do this topic justice -- we have to talk about them all.
The poet Robert Frost once wrote, "Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found that it was ourselves."
The flurry of postings recently that illustrate the "Tao take on [fill in the blank]" are not there to make you into a Taoist -- ironically even the Taoists don't care if you sign up (how nice is that?!) -- they're there because the Tao is the literal quintessence of "balance," something we often lack to a great degree, and sometimes hearing this ancient Wisdom can somehow bring us back and ground us, where we should have been all along. The Tao doesn't specifically have that much to say about "love, sex, 'n everything in between," but what it does have, I've posted recently -- in order to create a sense of balance, and a reflection as if in a mirror about what the "healthier"approach might be. Sometimes, frankly, we each lack that. We can do things for the wrong reasons, and betray ourselves in the process. We can GET married for the wrong reasons; we can STAY married for the wrong reasons; we can LEAVE a marriage for the wrong reasons; we can be CELIBATE for the wrong reasons, within a marriage -- we can just fundamentally fail to understand ourselves, our motivations, and the ones we're with.
Life is tricky, precious and fragile -- and we need to handle it with care. For that very reason, before we delve into what's wrong with some combat veteran's marriages and sex lives, I thought it was important to take a moment, and re-establish what balance and healthy love and sexuality would be. Now we'll have a frame of reference for the rest...
Ironically, if you read the short Tao passage on what being a "hero" actually means, you find someting really remarkable: it means showing up with everything in you, to participate in the life you have before you, like the Frost comment -- not withholding yourself, and who you really are. That's refreshing, bracing, and often terribly hard to do: in other words, just plain perfect. However else "America" defines "hero" -- if you can manage this, "you done good" :-)
