Not Being Careful

Rowing (M.A. Reilly)

I. 

I walked past an older woman whose husband was helping her to remove a jacket. She leaned heavily on a cane. When I pulled my car out of a parking lot, I saw this same couple slowly walking into the doctor's office I had just left. They held hands and seeing them made me spontaneously cry.

Sometimes the soulfulness of love undoes me. It was almost as if I was looking at a future I once thought probable. 

II. 

Mary Oliver writes, 

Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love. 

 III.

It’s easy to get burdened by what might have been. Oddly, it is love that lightens despair. To have been loved and to have loved without choice is a gift. 

As Rumi reminds, we knew each other well before meeting. We were inside one another all along.