"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." - Rumi
We tumbled through a life-affirming weekend—Friday's dinner dissolving into games and music with friends, Saturday's wedding reception spilling margaritas and laughter, Sunday's fall hike threading us through aspens ablaze in October gold. My eyes felt gritty from sleep deprivation, yet my heart expanded Grinch-like, swelling several sizes as we moved from one gathering to the next.
A persistent inner whisper craves weekend nights at home, pajama-clad and nestled into the couch with a magazine, novel, or remote control in hand. This domestic longing intensifies when the alternative involves navigating conversations with unfamiliar faces. I once made small talk with relative ease, but somewhere across the past two decades—accelerated by a pandemic that hermit-crabbed us all into our shells—I misplaced that social fluency. Here lies one of my barriers to cultivating platonic love: transcending superficial exchanges and investing sufficient time to build genuine trust, rather than executing an Irish goodbye the moment anxiety stirs.
Rob navigates such social waters with remarkable dexterity. Saturday evening, he confidently steered me between different clusters of guests, undeterred even by the CU football game flickering on a nearby screen. If social anxiety plagues him, he conceals it masterfully, and I cling to his side like a burr in a packhorse's coat. He declared the evening successful, though I felt certain I'd babbled continuously like a brook swollen with spring melt runoff.
The following morning discovered us hiking by eight o'clock in Golden Gate Canyon State Park, having outpaced fellow leaf-peepers to claim a parking spot. Frost glazed the ground cover flanking the trail, rendering rose hips unexpectedly soft beneath our fingertips and demanding warm outer layers for the first time this fall. Sharp easterly rays from the morning sun sliced through the warm yellow aspen leaves, igniting the trees like beacons of joy against the shadowed evergreens. We traversed seven miles, absorbing panoramic views, and I drove away feeling replenished—my spirit restored by movement and natural beauty.
This past weekend, my barriers to discovering loving connection revealed themselves clearly: laziness, social anxiety, inertia, misplaced priorities. We toppled them one by one. I'm capturing this reflection now as a reminder to myself—to knock them down again next time, and the time after that, because the reward of genuine connection always outweighs the comfort of retreat.
