LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING

     martin uzman, winter oak

The brakes on the car went out today at the most opportune place and time it could happen. I thanked God for it in a conversational manner, like, Thanks. I'd gone to see Chuck Billings the mechanic to get an inspection before I get a renewal on the tag. As I pulled up to the door at his garage, pushed on the brake pedal to stop, it stopped then the pedal made a soft popping sound and went to the floor. We looked and just inside the left rear wheel on the ground saw a circle of wet brake fluid. A rust spot in the brake line gave out. It happened to the brake line on the right side in July a couple miles from his shop, making it easy to get there with what little brake I had left. Today it was as I pulled up to the door. I can only take that as the Divine hand saying, "Howdy," letting me know He has His eye on me. It's not a critical, judgmental eye, but a helping eye, loving assistance, the kind of assistance I couldn't live without. I saw on facebook a picture Milly Richardson put up with a saying in it, I think they're called memes, maybe--pronounced meems. It was an Einstein quote saying there are 2 ways to view life. They are, #1 as if nothing is a miracle, #2 as if everything is a miracle. I thought when I saw that I'm of the latter mind. I see everything a miracle in that way of being guided by God, by the Flow, and protected too. When I allow. I've come to see that allowing is an expression of love. When I allow somebody to be who they are without me feeling I need to change something about them, that's a love expression.

This is something I've found important in my everyday life in the last few years. I have a friend I have watched grow up from a baby who has turned out to be the closest friend of my life. We are different people in a lot of ways and we understand each other. He's 30 now with wife and 3 kids. I do not for any reason correct him or try to change his thinking. He doesn't do that to me and I don't do that to him. From an old people perspective, I call it allowing. I allow him to live his life as himself without any attempt to control or manipulate. In a way, a big way, I think of not talking to him the way older people talk to younger people (you oughta, you needta, you gotta, you should) as a love expression. It's my way of saying I trust you to understand your life and your decision making. I don't need to be telling anybody how to live their life. Too many older people allow themselves the impulse to tell younger people what to do, because we see it from a perspective of a different kind of experience. I heard myself start a sentence twice in my fifties, "The kids these days...." I told myself there will not be a third time. On 60th birthday I went to see Papa Roach at Ziggy's in Winston-Salem. With the same purpose, a decade later reminder, I went to see Thrice in Charlotte on 70th birthday. In a crowd of young rockers I see the kids these days are cool people. I have nothing to teach them. I need to learn from them.

It was several years after I fell in with Meher Baba that I could entertain dealing with love. I'd grown up a Kansas baptist in a severely dysfunctional home (normal), no experience with love or compassion. Love had been shut down in me by age 10. When it came time to get married and reproduce I had no love to call upon. It wasn't about love. I thought love will come later. It didn't. What I thought of as falling in love was falling in heat. I had an argument with Baba for some time about love. Like I don't get it. I was looking for a way to tap into love realistically, not artificially or playing pretend. It seemed like a closed door. One day driving to Sparta, coming out of the curve after Deadman's Curve, heading into Thompson Flat, it came to me that I had read in Baba's discourses that understanding equals love, they are the same. Great flash. A welling up of joy inside, I said out loud, "I can do that!" Understanding was my doorway to love. It wasn't long after that moment, in years, I fell in love with all the people of my world, the people I see every day and the ones I don't see, the ones I like and the ones I don't like. I felt I understood them and forgave them everything that annoyed me before.

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