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04-15-2016, 02:59 PM
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Love is an integral part of our lives that unveils our good, bad, and broken bits -- as vital to our survival as water or food or air. Love isn't supposed to feel safe. It demands total surrender and promises nothing in return. However beautiful and enriching and necessary to human existence love may be, it can also be painful. And impermanent.
Philosopher Roland Barthes cites love as the romantic solution to the problem of death. When we fall in love, we are engorged with emotion. We see the other being as a solution to our problems, so while we are experiencing happiness we are also experiencing sadness because we are already mourning the day it will end.
Misery is the price we pay for love, a fair price if we know how magnificent it can be, but a cruel punishment nonetheless. Broken hearts are not easily mended: a terrifying notion. Cautiously dipping our feet into a strong current of suitable potentials, we search for the promise of eternal reciprocation--which is as unlikely as a paraplegic surviving in the deep end. We don't understand real pain until we try to put ourselves back together without all of our parts, like a puzzle missing pieces.
We learn that over time, broken hearts do heal. The gut wrenching, indescribable pain that bangs on our door after we've bared our soul eventually stops. And although love can be as reckless as clinging to a metal rod in a lightening storm, we go for it anyway.
If we are brave enough to bare the misfortunes of love, are we likely to find the real deal? The problem is that many of us don't believe love is a choice, so we parade through life waiting for love to choose us.
"You okay?" he asked.
I wasn't. It was early on a Saturday morning and I hadn't slept. We had a room booked for the weekend at a bed and breakfast in Big Sur. I gazed out the window at an old man walking by, wondering if he had loved and lost.
"I'm fine," I said.
Before I left his house that morning, I made sure he felt like he meant as much to me as my dry cleaner. Truth is, he meant much more, but I was too terrified to admit it.
We never made it to Big Sur. We never spoke again after that.
How many times had I walked away from a relationship because I wasn't willing to communicate or listen or forgive? I've abandoned boyfriends because they snored too much or left socks all over the house, which in hindsight I see as my fear of opening up, of getting too close.
The morning it all ended, I had hurried around the bedroom, looking for my clothes as if I were to find a piece of my dignity that had been stripped off the night before. I knew it was the last time I would be in that room. In the taxi, I stared blankly out the window feeling like my insides had been removed leaving only a skeleton. I felt the emptiness turn to confusion, then anger, then sadness.
Had I locked my heart in an impermeable box, fearful of the volatile nature of love? Had I tricked myself into thinking that love happens to us instead of the other way around? Had indifference become my mode of operation, leaving me alone and empty? It was in that moment, in the back of the taxi, when I realized that love is a choice. Confessing my true feelings and opening my heart, I decided, must be better than remaining untouched, even if by the hand of rejection.
We discover love when and only when we chose to find it--hidden under dirty socks, behind jealously, in the shadows of ego and fear. Love is part of the battle to understand ourselves and one another, down to every last idiosyncrasy.
Let us bask in the totality of what it means to be alive, wail in agony as our hearts are ripped from our chests, cry for those who have left us alone. Let us feel anger and grief when we become attached to the world and the mirrored souls who curse our existence. When we throw all our cards on the table and expose our selves, bearing our souls for all to see, we choose love.
But in our desperate quest for attention, while we remain unbiased to avoid vulnerability, we become interchangeable, disposable, unoriginal. By refusing to choose love we experience only romance, and the inevitable collapse of it.
Love, it seems, is not the absence of pain but the mastery of it. And mastery takes practice. The challenge is not to rid our selves of pain but to accept it as part of our life experience.
As Albert Camus said: Life should be lived to the point of tears. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. (http://start.westnet.ca/newstempch.php?article=terms.html/) It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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Love is an integral part of our lives that unveils our good, bad, and broken bits -- as vital to our survival as water or food or air. Love isn't supposed to feel safe. It demands total surrender and promises nothing in return. However beautiful and enriching and necessary to human existence love may be, it can also be painful. And impermanent.
Philosopher Roland Barthes cites love as the romantic solution to the problem of death. When we fall in love, we are engorged with emotion. We see the other being as a solution to our problems, so while we are experiencing happiness we are also experiencing sadness because we are already mourning the day it will end.
Misery is the price we pay for love, a fair price if we know how magnificent it can be, but a cruel punishment nonetheless. Broken hearts are not easily mended: a terrifying notion. Cautiously dipping our feet into a strong current of suitable potentials, we search for the promise of eternal reciprocation--which is as unlikely as a paraplegic surviving in the deep end. We don't understand real pain until we try to put ourselves back together without all of our parts, like a puzzle missing pieces.
We learn that over time, broken hearts do heal. The gut wrenching, indescribable pain that bangs on our door after we've bared our soul eventually stops. And although love can be as reckless as clinging to a metal rod in a lightening storm, we go for it anyway.
If we are brave enough to bare the misfortunes of love, are we likely to find the real deal? The problem is that many of us don't believe love is a choice, so we parade through life waiting for love to choose us.
"You okay?" he asked.
I wasn't. It was early on a Saturday morning and I hadn't slept. We had a room booked for the weekend at a bed and breakfast in Big Sur. I gazed out the window at an old man walking by, wondering if he had loved and lost.
"I'm fine," I said.
Before I left his house that morning, I made sure he felt like he meant as much to me as my dry cleaner. Truth is, he meant much more, but I was too terrified to admit it.
We never made it to Big Sur. We never spoke again after that.
How many times had I walked away from a relationship because I wasn't willing to communicate or listen or forgive? I've abandoned boyfriends because they snored too much or left socks all over the house, which in hindsight I see as my fear of opening up, of getting too close.
The morning it all ended, I had hurried around the bedroom, looking for my clothes as if I were to find a piece of my dignity that had been stripped off the night before. I knew it was the last time I would be in that room. In the taxi, I stared blankly out the window feeling like my insides had been removed leaving only a skeleton. I felt the emptiness turn to confusion, then anger, then sadness.
Had I locked my heart in an impermeable box, fearful of the volatile nature of love? Had I tricked myself into thinking that love happens to us instead of the other way around? Had indifference become my mode of operation, leaving me alone and empty? It was in that moment, in the back of the taxi, when I realized that love is a choice. Confessing my true feelings and opening my heart, I decided, must be better than remaining untouched, even if by the hand of rejection.
We discover love when and only when we chose to find it--hidden under dirty socks, behind jealously, in the shadows of ego and fear. Love is part of the battle to understand ourselves and one another, down to every last idiosyncrasy.
Let us bask in the totality of what it means to be alive, wail in agony as our hearts are ripped from our chests, cry for those who have left us alone. Let us feel anger and grief when we become attached to the world and the mirrored souls who curse our existence. When we throw all our cards on the table and expose our selves, bearing our souls for all to see, we choose love.
But in our desperate quest for attention, while we remain unbiased to avoid vulnerability, we become interchangeable, disposable, unoriginal. By refusing to choose love we experience only romance, and the inevitable collapse of it.
Love, it seems, is not the absence of pain but the mastery of it. And mastery takes practice. The challenge is not to rid our selves of pain but to accept it as part of our life experience.
As Albert Camus said: Life should be lived to the point of tears. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. (http://start.westnet.ca/newstempch.php?article=terms.html/) It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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