Grinch Has the Answer!

I was just thinking, while waiting for my nail polish to dry. Because that's pretty much all you can do while waiting for nail polish to dry, unless you want everything around you to match your nails.

So what craziness was I thinking? Well, I'll tell you. My first husband, Dave had a tendency to want to limit how many and which people we hung around with, or became close friends with. Any time I made a new friend on my own, he disapproved, and actually asked me a few times why I felt like I needed more friends.

Being the (mostly) friendly and open person that I am, it is natural for me to start finding common interests and having deeper conversations with people whom I spend more than a little time around. Doing this tends to cause me to have a few friends with whom I am very close, rather than tons of friends who only touch the surface. While I still have lots of "surface" friends, I am very drawn to those who become close and want to communicate with them as much as we can manage.

Dave is a self-proclaimed "social dinosaur" who does not particularly wish to have more than one or two close friends, and everyone else falls into the group in which he "hates everybody equally."

I tried several times in our relationship to explain to him why I needed to be so friendly. I would reply that my heart was too small to have only him in it. I couldn't explain it clearly to him and usually resorted to the useless and (usually) untrue statement, "You wouldn't understand." Maybe he would have understand if I could just think of a way to express it clearly.

This morning I was thinking about how to explain that. I was actually thinking about the Grinch when it came to me. See, I knew the chorus was good for me in more ways than just a musical outlet! (We're singing a song from that movie this year.) You know how the story says that the Grinch's heart was too small? And how it grew and grew once he let himself be open to the love and joy of the residents of Whoville? That's it!

The heart, soul, spiritual being connects to other beings, and by doing so it gains depth; it expands further out into the universe, into the oneness that brings us all together. By staying remote and remaining only within in ourselves, we are not able to reach out into that oneness. We remain small and singular, and thus get all our love, joy, comfort, etc. only from within, or from whatever soul happens to be the only outside source.

So by saying that my heart was too small to only hold Dave in it, what I really meant was that I didn't want it to be only him and me in it. I wanted to somehow reach out into that connected oneness that is the whole spiritual universe that I knew existed. To do that, you have to open yourself up, let others in, and share yourself with others. That's how it works, and I really can't think of a better way to say it.

Grinch had the explanation all along, which is really ironic since Dave liked to be more Grinchy than anyone I knew. I wonder if he stepped out of that little shell and learned to share in the world around him? I hope so. It would be an awful waste if he didn't.