36 SEPTEMBER 2024 WorldWide Drilling Resource® You Start with Fire then Lose the Flame by Tim Connor To paraphrase a Bob Seger song, every relationship starts with fire, but over time most lose the flame and the ashes accumulate cold and dark. Why? Where does the romance, the fire, passion, and dreams go? Why do people settle, argue, confront, insist on protecting their ego, invalidate, and generally just live under the same roof, some as strangers, for all their remaining years without the fun, laughter, excitement, and adventure of when their relationship was new? I can hear some of you now, “Tim, that’s just the way it is.” I disagree. It’s just the way we let it become. I know couples in their 70s and 80s who have been married for over 50 years and I can tell you, they are as much in love with their partners, passionate about each day they have together, and look forward to the next exciting adventure whether it is a walk in the park or a trip around the world as they were when it all began. I’ve been in relationships that started with flames and over time just began to smolder, then die a slow or quick death. In looking back, I’ve asked myself many times what I missed. What should I have done differently? Was it all up to me? Did I do enough? Where did the love and passion go? It’s frustrating to look back on a failed relationship, knowing it might have been more or lasted longer if I had only known then what I know now or learned with the passage of time. Then again, I believe there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. People come and go in and out of our lives for a purpose. The key is to learn this purpose so you can continue to grow and learn - with them or without them. I’m not trying to be harsh, but I believe some things are meant to be and others, well, we try and manipulate them to be what we believe we want or deserve only to discover in the grand scheme of things they were not in our long-term best interests. They were not relationships which fostered our potential, contributed to our dreams, or helped us become all we were capable of becoming. These relationships, my friends, should be abandoned. Yes, people can change. They can become nicer, more loving, positive, optimistic, and more supportive of everything positive, but they can also become more vindictive, angry, caustic, critical, and more negative and pessimistic. I, for one, am a slow learner. It’s taken too many years and too much pain to finally come to the place where acceptance, hope, passion, dreams, and all that can be reside. So my mantra is now, “I’m just getting warmed up . . .” In His service, Tim Tim Connor may be contacted via e-mail to michele@worldwidedrillingresource.com
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