Often I receive letters and telephone calls from sisters who tell me how lucky I am that I have a loving and supportive partner. They then go on to tell me how bad and difficult their lives are. While I do my best to assure them that there is no “perfect” or “absolute” answer to how life should be, they seldom understand that each and everyone must find their own way.
Many years ago (actually, more than I care to count) I was living in a small Japanese town on the outskirts of Tokyo. One of my closest friends was a college professor. My friend, knowing my great interest in Eastern Religions, introduced me to an elderly Buddhist priest. My Japanese was not perfect, and the priest’s English was just as poor, yet we were able to converse through the night on into the next morning. All the while I continued to marvel at the wisdom of this very old holy man.
In the course of our conversation, I happened to mention to him about an impoverished young orphan girl I had met in the area where I lived. I talked of how hard her life was and made a statement somewhat like, “What a bad life she has.” The old priest sipped some tea, sat quietly for a few moments and then said, in perfect English, “No. She does not have a bad life, and she does not have a good life. What she does have is her life.”
His wisdom and outlook have been with me ever since that night. Whenever I begin thinking that my way has been particularly hard or difficult, I stop and remember that old priest. Then, I say to myself, “My life is not hard, it is not easy, it is simply my life.”
As we were growing up, we watched Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. At the end of each episode, we sang along with them as they would sing, “Happy Trails to You.” What happened to our “happy trails?” All too often our happy trails seem to have turned into 40 miles of bad road, but they haven’t. They have simply become our roads. They are trails which we ourselves have blazed across the unexplored wilderness of our lives.
How then shall we live? Upon what foundations shall we base our decisions? First of all, while I do not claim to be a devout Christian, there is one passage in the New Testament which states more clearly than any other verse, how our lives should be directed. In speaking of Jesus, the writer says, “And he went about doing good.” That’s it. Nothing more needs to be said in reference to Christian teachings.
Hidden within each and everyone one of us, is a unique and special person. It’s true that we have many similarities to others, yet we are all different. As strongly as I encourage others to seek the woman within themselves and not to imitate some movie star, I encourage others to find their own way, to seek their own trails.
Linda and I spend a great deal of our time reading and listening to music. One particular singer who we enjoy is Enya. Her voice is ethereal and the lyrics, which she writes herself, are extremely powerful. Here is a passage from one of her songs:
There is no one particular way that our lives should be, other than that they be our lives. Be we crossdressers, transsexuals or partners, we have the opportunity to constantly seek new horizons and discover the person within us.
Somewhere, hidden within us is a precious jewel; our life is a search to find that jewel. The jewels are all different from one another. Mine is unlike yours, and yours is unlike anyone else’s.
We all need to seek our own unique jewel. When you find it, you will know.