Sharing the best of ourselves

I just read the following article this morning. It is by Anne Rennie, published in Australian Catholic's, p.6, Spring 2009 issue. I hope you find some insight in it also!

Sharing the best of ourselves

Affirming each person we meet.

Australian writer David Malouf writes of "the sacrament of daily existence", the ordinary, prosaic, uneventful graced power of people living good lives in community. These are communities built on healthy relationships of trust and tolerance, of generosity and good sense, of seeing the other in someone else's world view, life style, taste in music or dress sense and inviting that other to see you in the same way. It is about sharing the best of ourselves with others and vice versa.

I met my husband doing a writing course and, as is the way with romance, the beans were spilt slowly and carefully over the months of courtship. I was in my mid-thirties, had done the traveling, cleaning and barmaiding all over England, had picked daffodils in Cornwall, run a disco in Guernsey and sold kitchens in Wimbledon. I was back in Melbourne after eight carefree years.

As we got to know each other I confessed that I wanted to be the best me I could be. To find that part of me I had decided to pursue my passion for the written word. Fortunately he had decided to pursue his passion for me, and we married six months after our first date. And he still believes, after fifteen years, that the best of me is still to come.

My favourite quote is George Eliot's, "It is never too late to be who you might have been." And so I persist - with love and encouragement and only the occasional groan when I get too precious or forgetful - to do the things that lift my life beyond its demands and dailiness. I look at beautiful paintings, read unfashionable books, dress with a fine disregard for the bland and beige and don't dally over dusting. I am free to be me, to do some of the things I love.

Meanwhile, my husband is busy finishing his rites-of-passage novel and waiting for the Tiger of old to come good again. Our daughter watches Mum and Dad and her uncles and aunts and teachers and other adults doing their bit in the local choir or at the op-shop or volunteering their time for those in need. She will learn, I hope, that the best of someone is not something to be kept secret and shrouded, but to be shared so that we all benefit in this goodness, this vast renewable sustainable resource that only humans can create.

Healthy relationships allow people to be who they truly are, their essential selves, stripped of affectation and ambition, the false adornments and layers we build in trying to become what other people want. It is about being authentic - where the outer person truly reflects the inner person. It is about seeing the good before the bad, prioritising the positive and seasoning all relationships with empathy, compassion, a bit of forgiving and forgetting and a good dose of laughter.

If we can find and affirm the best of each person we meet, whether spouse or sibling, colleague or child, surely we are on the way to living out in our ragged, messy, holy, hopeful, human way that sacrament of daily existence, the blessedness of minutes, hours, days and years of our lives.