Over the weekend I came down with a monster stye on my eye.
The top eyelid of my left eye swelled up to about double it’s size. Besides being painful and making it difficult to see, I found that my eye wasn’t the only thing that was hurting.
My patience took a hit, too.
I was fine with the eye thing, as long it was gone by Monday morning so I could get back to my everyday life. When I woke up on Monday to find it wasn’t better, but actually far worse, I was pretty pissed.
Hadn’t the Universe been notified how wonderfully patient I had been over the past two days??? Shouldn’t that be rewarded with the eye getting better, not worse?
Turns out I had more to learn from this painful, irritating, and really-not-a-big-deal-at-all eye infection than I originally thought.
First of all, it’s ironic that only a month earlier my husband had the same issue.
I told him countless times that he needed to call the doctor and displayed no compassion when he refused to, while his stye only got bigger.
On the other hand, when mine started, I called the doctor right away, got some antibiotic eye drops, and religiously applied a hot compress per the doctor’s orders. Did it work? Uh, no.
All I can say is that my stye is far larger and more crazy looking than my husband’s ever was.
Lesson learned? It was so easy to judge my husband, but lacking compassion for others never helps anyone get better quicker.
Showing love and empathy, even when the other person doesn’t want to handle a situation the way you think they should, is the only thing that will lead to more love.
When we judge others, we’re putting ourselves above them. We KNOW better.
But when we take a step back and are honest, most times we realized we have no clue what is better. I wanted my husband to go to the doctor because it was going to make ME feel better. Not because I had any real knowledge of what would happen with his eye.
As I’ve come to learn from first-hand knowledge, healing for a stye generally just takes time. And I can promise my judgmental comments toward my husband didn’t help his healing one bit.
So why do we do it? Why do we pass our judgments onto others?
For me, I realized it was fear.
My husband means the world to me. The thought of him being sick drums up fear in me. I’m sure I also thought if he went to the doctor, he’d get a general check-up, too. And assuming everything was cleared by the doctor, I could feel a little more security, a little more at peace.
Seems logical, but when I really step back and look at it, that fear would only be soothed. It wouldn’t go away.
Just a temporary fix until something else popped up that he didn’t want to go to the doctor for, and we’d have the same conversation all over again.
Fear keeps us from relaxing into love.
When we worry about our loved ones and our own physical bodies we think we are doing it out of love and protection. In a funny way, worrying actually makes us feel a little better, or we wouldn’t do it.
But when we take a step back, we realize we are just creating more fear.
It seems less crazy to try and force someone to handle a situation the way we think they should by prefacing it with the all important phase “I worry because I love you”.
Or after the twentieth time of them not taking our advice, “If something happens to you, it’s not on me! I just want you to know that.”
But what we are really saying is I’m scared. I’m scared something is going to happen to you and I won’t know what to do, so I’ll try and control this situation now. It will make me feel better.
What if instead of trying to control the other person and the unknown, we just make a suggestion and let it go? Then just go about loving them.
You’ve said what you logically think is the best option, but they need to decide for themselves how they are going to handle things.
Either way, your love and compassion doesn’t have to shift based on their action- or lack of action.
Always returning to love is actually far easier than loving conditionally. It takes less thought. You just go on loving them. When we set parameters on our love, we have to put a lot of needless energy into the situation and create more stress.
As for my eye, I’ve decided while it hasn’t been the most enjoyable experience, it was a pretty easy way to be reminded of two important lessons.
First, things happen when they are supposed to happen. Healing doesn’t happen on our command.
Second, leading with love always leads to more love. Resistance and nagging are just forms of one person trying to exhibit control over another, disguised as caring.
And these two reminders are enough to actually make me a little grateful for this little eye situation! Plus, if it last until Halloween, I’ll make the perfect Rocky Balboa. No makeup needed!
