Hey friends.
How are you today?
What have you been doing with your family these days while you’re under lockdown? If you’ve been living alone then this article might help you in terms of appreciating your family and even what it really means to be with the person you are building your best life with. I can write this article today purely because I have lived in a codependent family as a young girl and then left to live my own life for roughly fourteen years. I have also been in a relationship where I endured domestic violence.
If you’ve been following my story and if not let me repeat it here. Last year this very same time I returned to my family in South Africa after being away for eighteen years. I was very unsure what this life was going to be like but coming back home has taught me a lot about love, codependence and coexistence. Today I’d like to share this information with you so that you can have the best lifestyle by understanding how love is showing up in your life and why you should acknowledge it, respect it and be grateful for it. Why love is greater than the arguments, why love is an important basis for anything to stick together, stick so strong that people remain married until death and family members have a lifetime of mostly good connection. Why love is one of the main forces that motivate people to get off their bums.
I’m sure you can relate now more than ever that living together with your family to some extent is making you feel like you don’t have any space. Oh yes, some people even said, “OMG, I have to live for twenty-one days with my family under lockdown and we can’t even take walks. We’re all going to fight.” You know what I thought here, “Glad some members of my family also had the same thoughts.” If you’re not from South Africa, this is what one of our lockdown rules are. Also, in South Africa, third world countries and a few families in first world countries there are a lot of people who do live in codependency.
Let’s for a temporary moment in our lives (during this lockdown period) look at this as symbiosis. What if we take the world of codependency and change that world to symbiosis or coexist this would be a healthy transformation? What is symbiosis? Symbiosis is when living together becomes a win-win. For example, coral and algae, cleaner fish and African oxpeckers that feed on the back of zebras, elephants and other animals usually killing ticks. There are so many plants and animals that have this win-win relationship. So, after all these years coming home and living like the way tight-knit Hindu communities live our family had some major shifts this year, we fought oh, yes, we did, but we fought forward. Believe it or not, we have actually got to a peaceful 5th day and more before the lockdown even began. What’s great is that most arguments have not repeated the same issue. While some of the same issues could have repeated one or two times it did not repeat more than three. So, if you’re arguing in lockdown or fighting, please stop the fights but argue forward.
Look, Coronavirus was pretty happy coexisting with its host until it jumped onto humans. We have several viruses already living in us that have learnt to coexist with us. Bats have so many viruses that they have learnt to coexist with. Think about the jungle, it’s a massive body where several species are coexisting to survive the best way they know how while some forms of coexisting can be more aggressive and get names like codependency it’s ultimately about surviving either aggressively or just enough to get by without affecting anyone. As humans let us not become worse than animals by taking on the aggressive side where we become codependent. But there is a greater love, there’s love in a jungle and its species; most mothers in the jungle are trying to provide for their young and mother earth is providing this to all of us, all what we need and if you want to believe it or not the universal element of just trusting is there too even the plants out there have no choice but to trust, yet we humans complicate it. With healthy love comes trust.
So, I ask you to do more than what you are currently doing in terms of love. See more than what you are currently seeing in terms of love. The love you give, you get back. In some parts of the world, we have just become so selfish even to shower that and we’ve become particular about who we’re showering it to, like who should deserve love and who shouldn’t. Some people have made it so exclusive that it’s become elusive or illusive. Idolising the fairy-tale is fine but when it comes to love it’s a verb and when the make-up and palace is gone can you still love? Can you accept it all for better and worse and still let love be the path going forward? – T. Dench Patel, 1 April 2020, 18:11
This is how our grandparents did it, this is how some of the older generations like our parents have lived like after the war. Love makes you do the work, it makes you push yourself, love doesn’t want to not love, love gets you through adversities, love gets you to be happy, love gets you to peace, love gets harmony, love gets to be the winner. – T. Dench Patel, 1 April 2020, 18:16
If love can do so much how come some of us have bet so little on it or its force?
Ever since I’ve returned home I’ve seen so many acts of love that I might not have valued when I was a teenager or even a child, I came back to remembering what was always there and is still there because of the value each family member has to my life in one way or another and they would probably see me in their personal way as me having some value in their life. This love over time gets so eroded when you’re not together and spend years away from each other. The human nature and time, we forget, we forget how it felt and it’s easy to get consumed by the present and the non-existent. My parents say, “We’ve have been missing you all the time, we think of you all the time, even when we eat. We pray for you.”
Like right about half an hour ago, by the way, I am typing this off the battery of my computer. The electricity is gone. It’s 20:13 on the 1st of April 2020, I was supposed to post all my content on all my social media platforms by now as I would do each day, but I can’t. I’ve decided to finish this article and if it wasn’t for the electricity going right now, I wouldn’t have been able to make this article stronger in terms of the title and what I am trying to demonstrate to you. So, here I am 20:16 about half an hour ago we all finished have dinner and I was doing the dishes and the electricity went down. I am so fortunate and blessed to coexist with my family. As I lived alone for many years, I was already pulling off my hand gloves to go and get the candles and the flashlights/floodlights but then a voice in the other end of the house said I’ll get the candles and floodlights another person went to help, the dog followed along because he didn’t like the darkness and was scared of the lightning, another member of the family saw if they could do something about my battery running low on my computer right now while I typed. Another member of the family was inspecting all the snacks on the table. This my friends is a blessed place to end up in. If you’ve fought for this and moved forward, it’s worth having the peace, love, help and support in the tough times. Think about it, if there are so many people coexisting together and no longer want to struggle, feel pain and live old patterns; people will be willing to move forward, then the fights and arguments are six-fold but when you get it right, the blessing is just about six-fold too.
Not many people can say this, and not many people can do this because in some places of this world there is so much of help that you can run from what is really good for you and you won’t ever know it. Now in lockdown, you have nowhere to run but to solve it.
So I hope in lockdown you will become a stronger unit and coexist, feel what you’ve never got the chance to feel because you could always run and mostly ran away from pressing issues that you maybe never knew of or knew all along. Now is the time to face it straight on. For the singles, I hope this article has taught you that there is a fairy tale if you choose first what comes with the force of love, love in your passion, love in the partner you choose, love in acting and seeing someone’s struggle ease off, love in yourself, love yourself and the last and main thing of all is that you must be ready to see the force and act from love more so out of the honeymoon phase. – T. Dench Patel, 1 April 2020, 20:33
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by either purchasing one of my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
The audiobook for The South African: True Colours is available on iTunes, Apple and Audible. The South African: Roamer and Light will be released soon.
Note: Do keep referring back to this site as much as possible, as I grow, a more profound perspective may form and so I will always come back to each of these articles to reevaluate them.
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