Play One on TV

Editor’s note: Okay, this really isn’t a sonnet. It’s prose, and darned prosaic if you ask me. However, it sums up how I feel about soulmates in general, and my soulmate in particular. This little diatribe started with a contest on Boomer Chick. Nothing gets my tongue all flowery like a writing contest.

Warning: Those of you with low sugar tolerance may want to skip this one. I promise to return to my regular lowbrow humor tomorrow.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Soul mates” are overrated. So many of us wander through life in search of this mythical end-all, be-all of ultimate companionship. We carry with us the belief that there is one special person in this great big world that can fulfill every broken hope and half-realized dream within.

What we fail to realize that the world is chock full of soulmates. We live in a sea of compatibility that is teeming with soulmates. Just like an assortment of wildflowers or a bundle of colorful balloons, soulmates come in such a bountiful variety that we cannot help but find something, anything, that speaks to us. In every rainbow, someone’s favorite color is shining if he or she would only look long enough. So it goes with soulmates ; we’re so busy looking to the horizon for that prince or princess that we fail to notice them standing right beside us, looking to that same horizon.

And when we find this person, we latch on with a manic glee, shouting, “You are the one!” at the top of our lungs. We exchange our hearts and desperately shove them in places where we want them, oh so badly, to fit perfectly.

And that’s where we tend to make it all go wrong. Just as our own souls need care and nuturing, so do our relationships with our soulmates. Every flower starts life in a perfect splash of color, but without the mundanities of water and earth, that color fades to brown, and life decays to death.

We see the soulmate as the end of the search and the beginning of eternal bliss. And that is what ends so many of our so-called perfect matches. The soulmate is a beginning, not an end - the start of a long journey that will be filled with difficulty and uncertainty. The soulmate is a companion through trial and travail; through rain and fire; in the proverbial sickness and health. The soulmate is not there to fulfill; the soulmate is there to complete. Like a jigsaw puzzle, that completion takes time, hard work, and patience.

Don’t pin your hopes on finding your soulmate. Pin them on keeping your soulmate. Your heart will thank you, quite possibly for the rest of your life.

Written with sincerity by a man who has traveled 20 long years… with his soulmate.