Walking Past Love — A Lesson in Giving
By: Tony Krol
Tags: Life, Christmas Giving, Yoga, Dad, Death

This year has taught me a lot about anger. We come into the world screaming to clear out our lungs and learn to breathe air. It seems like a pretty violent way to begin life, but that’s the point. This entire life is a curriculum to learn how to deal with a set of circumstances each day, and there are a few ways to handle them: with fear, anger, or love.

The amazing thing about life, is that this curriculum isn’t just a simple paper test, it’s an experience of fluctuating energy, and the cause and effect of free will. The most valuable lesson I’ve learned in the last two years is that everything absorbs everything, even our bodies absorb the energy of our environments. Have you heard the saying “Look at that kid, he’s a sponge just soaking everything up.” That is exactly what kids are, but adults also, we actually never stop soaking in energy from everything around us.

Growing up, I didn’t have an understanding of how to give love to any situation, because I lived in a tense house, and absorbed the anger from alcoholism, domestic violence, and a lifestyle that wasn’t grounded. This is what I was made of from a experiential standpoint, but I always knew there was a lot more to “me,” and was aware from a very young that there was a bit of information missing. Further, it wasn’t the fault of my mother, or my father, and there’s no way either of them could have “done better,” because they also had missing information.

In my developing years as a child, we moved around from state to state, living in different camp sites and trailers. This was our home in Wyoming when I was born.

My father was a Vietnam Veteran, and he got his spine slit with a straight razor in a bar fight and was dismissed from duty. He rode a motorcycle and crashed it one night drunk. From this day, according to my mother, he was angry and violent, this led to his behavior and ultimately him being absent (physically) from my life and my sisters. I know this hurt him. He definitely suffered, and the pain just intensified because it never went anywhere.

He was a raging alcoholic, and took his anger out on anything around him. I came to find out later from my mother, that his mother treated him horribly.

I was born into a family that didn’t know peace, and could have been a model family for America because on the surface it looked pretty damn normal.

Not a single individual in my life lived off of the receipt and giving of love, they lived out of a reaction to suffering.

It appears to me that most of us cry to learn how to breathe, and then never stop the violence and suffering, unless it is possible to awaken from it, but someone has to show the way. That is why we are here on this planet, to help one another end each others suffering. This is the purpose of family, of friends, of caring for one another, and the lesson behind giving anything to another person. We are quite literally either pushing each other over cliffs, or saving each others asses.

The way we do it (save each others asses), is the missing information I never had as a child. It is by channeling and redirecting energy.