Playing The Part...

Life roll out the repetition, please...
It seems like that's exactly what I asked for and Life is obliging me every step of the way. Good thing I took the advice to notice what I notice or I would be missing some important lessons right now. One lesson being the ability to relate to others while being myself. Seems simple enough, but when you've spent a good part of your life living through other people's perceptions, knowing who "you" are is a pretty daunting task. Then, once you are introduced to yourself, there's the task of knowing how to discern who to share your life with and who should remain in orbit. I haven't reached this pinnacle yet, but I've learned how to recognize the path to it.
We can't escape being in relationships. Even isolated, we are in relationship to ourselves and whatever is in our environment. To me, this means, at our core, we already have the essential things we need all the time. It seems, our issue is how to take off our conditioning long enough to recognize it and learn to harvest what is already present. I'm finding the space between conditioned mind and what can be is very narrow with too many doors to choose from. What's frustrating is going through the same door over and over again. What's frightening is learning it doesn't matter which door you take, if you haven't first learned how you got in the space in the first place. From this space, I can see my choices weren't actually choices. They look more like repeated reactions based on things I'm afraid of or what I've agreed love is. These thoughts lead me to this lesson.
Much of our living, if we do not awaken to the patterns, is spent repeating our past. (duh! I know.) Much of what we call learning, is taking the past and bringing it present. Sometimes we try to change it, most of the time, we leave it as it is. We repeat this in our relationships, too. We take all of the memories, conscious or not, of all the relationships we've ever had and bring them to the present then wonder why they don't work or why they lack something essential. Like in learning, memory is the boundary, the limiting factor, of our relationships.
Around family and close friends our memory is a script we hand to each other. Often, we use these scripts to elevate the perception of our value and worth to ourselves and to others. We remind people what their place is in that circle and any deviation is taken as a treat, especially if that person is doing better than we are. Around acquaintances and strangers,our memory acts like an invisible assessment sheet that evaluates worth and value, always according to who we think we are or who we want to be-- aka projections. Until we can look past our memory, we cannot have authentic relations. On every level, we will repeat the patterns either with others or on ourselves.
Having an authentic relationship is about being able to perceive it as it is, not as we wish, want, or hope it can be with using the past. Righteous judgment is revealed when we've moved past the past. Until we are able to look at people as they are, we don't know them. We may know things about them, we may even know their patterns, but we do not know them. We can only know a person when we are intimate with them. Intimacy happens when we can share the smallest, most insignificant things of ourselves with another, without feeling less than. It happens when we can share our present experiences with knowledge that these experiences are inexhaustible. This is the moment when we know who to become intimate with and who to let stay on the periphery of our lives, in love.
If you find yourself surrounded by people that can only speak of what you used to be or do, they no longer know you. If they cannot speak about the person you are now or the things you are presently doing, you can either refresh the relationship or let them go. People who are unwilling to let you grow in their minds are invested in the role you play in their life. Give them back their scripts and walk off the stage.