That little thing called....
Apr. 9th, 2009 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joegodaLove. I have, and I'm sure many of you have as well, spent untold and untellable hours trying to figure this thing called love out. What is it? Why is it? Why does it hurt so much? Why does it bring so much joy? Does it really cure all ills, or does it cause more issues than it cures?
Here's a bit of my take on it, for what it's worth.
Love is a feeling. An emotional reaction to stimuli, both environmental and chemical that affect our mental and physical states. Boiled down medically and scientifically, it is a psycho-physical reaction created by the body in reaction to an outside stimulus, real or imagined.
This does not remove the mystery, nor does it remove the wonder of it all.
We, as human beings, are, at the root of it all, at our core, selfish things. We live to keep ourselves alive. Our entire being is devoted to this. Survival. It is, from conception, what we do. We strive to be alive and survive.
So why do we risk it all by Loving others?
Not things, because I have a firm conviction that we don't love things. We desire them or covet them. Of course, there are those who say they 'love' icecream. Or love that new car smell. Or love money. That's not love. That's desire of ownership.
Loving other living beings (and this includes animals and possibly plants) is, in my mind, the desire to commune. To be a part of. To share and be shared. This is how I see loving, which is different from love itself. The verb is not the noun. The act of breathing air is not air.
It is entirely possible to lead ones life and love all that are there to love, and never express that love in a purely open way. It may not be much fun, but I believe it is possible. Or, it may be as much fun as one wants.
Religious sects claim to love all, and there are some members of these sects I'd like to believe who can love all chastely, without having met the object of that love.
Love, therefore, may very well be something that can be generated by an internal stimulus as well. It may be that love, in whatever form it takes, doesn't require much effort at all to spring into existence. It may be that love is a self-generating delusion.
Regardless, Love is. It is an emotion, a feeling, an irrationality.
I've heard love is a gift. The Gift of Love. That may be. In my mind, though, love is not a gift. It is not something that can be wrapped up and given. It is not something that can be separated from the giver. It can be offered, and it can be excepted or rejected, but it can't be given. It isn't something that you can put on your shelf, nor is it something that is always readily visible. Love is not a gift, but it can be an offering. They are two distinct things.
If I gift a person, I pass something from me to them. It leaves me and is theirs, to do with as they wish. Granted, this might seem like what happens to love. We give it away and if it is real, it comes back to us, yes? No. Love, regardless of the recipient, never truly leaves us. Love is like a never ending string that starts with our emotional well being and if accepted by another, connects us to them. But it never, ever, truly leaves us. The love we feel is part and parcel of who and what we are.
Love is an offering. I offer this part of me to you. If you accept it, it will connect us in a way that I am not connected to any other being. If you do not accept it, the love will still be there, and I will still be connected to you, because I will still love you.
It is not a requirement that love be returned. Love that requires anything is not love, it is a demand, it is emotional blackmail. Love has no promise of reciprocation, no promise of 'return to sender'. Any such belief that love has a promise of return is a lie. That is the illusion of our want. That is the manipulation of our desires.
Love is. Love exists. Love is a feeling towards some other being. The reasons we love are as complex and as simple as the persons we are. There are those I love simply because they exist. There may be things or events in their existence that prompt that love, and the enumeration of what those things may be would wear me out counting them, and bore anyone that cares to listen. The reasons may be very small, but there are, I believe, countless numbers of those small things.
Love does not take large things into reason. Love does not take small things into reason. Love does not reason at all.
I am going to give a simple example. I have a friend who lives many miles away. This is a person that nobody that knows me has met in person. She found, when she was very young, that she had breast cancer. She was 28, and had two small children and had just divorce a very verbally and physically abusive husband. She also found out that her ex-husband was bi-sexual (which may cause some of you to shrug and say 'So?', but there is an importance in it). She beat back the cancer for nearly 20 years, and now it's back. She has lived with this disease for all her fully adult life, and she continues to struggle with it through numerous treatments and setbacks and weakness and all the horrible, horrible things that has happened to her mind and body.
There are other very negative things that have happened in her life, and though very, very important to her, and while having a serious effect on her ability to fight back the depression that impending death causes, matters not one whit to those who don't know her.
I met her while I was working the phones in Customer Service. I answered the phone with my typical "This is Chester, what may I do for you?"
She answered "You can pay my bill." And then she laughed.
We spoke for about twenty minutes that call. I found ways to help her save money, for which she thanked me, and then she extracted a promise from me... a promise to call her that night. She was at a conference in San Francisco, and she didn't know anyone. She didn't ask me to call her. She simply said, "Call me tonight", and then gave me her number.
I broke protocol and pushed some ethical boundaries and called her that night. We have been friends now for going on 5 years. I have met her once, when she was in Oklahoma City. Just once, for four hours. There was no sex involved, and the night ended with me kissing her cheek and hugging her. I will always remember those four hours and hold them in my heart because they contained love in their essence, as pure as possible.
Do I know she felt the same way I did? No. I have no clue as to what she felt. Even if I had asked her, her answer would have been colored by my asking of the question. Her answer would have been irrelevant. I KNOW that I loved her that night, as purely as I can.
This is a person I love and love as deeply as I love anyone. There is, in me, only one depth to love and only one way to love. I love as deeply as possible and unconditionally.
Love does not place or make restrictions. Love is mindless. It either is, or it isn't. Love does not have degrees. Anything less than the loving fully is not love. It is the lesser feeling of like, in varying degrees.
Why do I love this person? A thousand, thousand reasons. Do I love everything about her? Yes, because it is impossible, to me, to love only a part and not the whole.
Do I like everything about her? No. We have major issues on religion, as I have none and she is very devout to hers. I also have a major issue with homophobia. I see no rational reason for it, and she is very much homophobic. This would preclude any sort of long term habitation. What I don't like about her is as irrelevant to my love of her as marshmallows are to the swallows in Capistrano.
Love doesn't care about like. Like varies. I used to like plumbs and crab-apple jelly. Now I find them horrible. I used to absolutely dislike broccoli, but now I find I rather like it under the right circumstances. I do not like beer, but I drink it because when I am with my friends, whom I love, the fact that I dislike beer doesn't matter one bit.
I love my friend's strengths, and I also love my friends weaknesses. It would be too easy to say I don't love her homophobia and that I don't love her religious devotion. In fact, I love those things about her, as well. Although I do not and may never agree with her choices, she stands by her beliefs with conviction and solidarity. It is her strength and her weakness.
I understand where some of her feelings come from, and that understanding comes from hours of talking openly to each other about not only what is comfortable but that which is also uncomfortable. Love inspired the trust to step out of my circle and into hers, knowing that I couldn't fail. I trusted my love of her would keep my mind open to her feelings. I knew that I may never agree with her, but I trusted that I would love her enough to listen, and to talk.
Never once did I wonder if I would lose her love. That I might never occurred to me because I love her. It doesn't make her love any less important. It is just that I did not require her loving me to be able to love her. Her loving me is an glad effect that I treasure, and I would love her regardless of it.
Love isn't trust. Love may inspire trust. And that trust may lead one astray and cause pain and doubt and damage. Many terrible things have been done to those who love by those whom they love. The manipulator used the love and devotion (two different things) they saw and took advantage of that trust (also different from love) to achieve a desire (also very different) they felt they needed to achieve for whatever reason they felt they needed to achieve it.
This is an illustration of the human mind to let the illusion of love cloud their vision. It is what happens when one has the expectation that love will be returned. It is what happens when one has the fear that love will not be returned. It has been said that some 'Will to anything for Love", even if the things that are done are debasing and self-destructive.
Love has no illusion. The illusion is desire. The illusion is expectation. The illusion is that love requires or demands anything. The illusion is that if one loves hard enough and proves that love, then that love will be returned. There is no promise of return of love. There is only the love that one feels. There is no proof of love. Love simply is.
That love cannot be destroyed is still an unknown to me. Can love be destroyed? Can the object of that love be so terrible, be so manipulative and destructive that love itself fails? Or has the dislike and the disdain of the object of love grown so large that it overshadows any love that was felt to the point that the love has the illusion of being destroyed. Can indifference actually exist after one has loved? I do not think so.
I would like to think that love cannot be destroyed. I would like to think that the reasons love existed in the beginning still exist, and will continue to exist, regardless of the current or past or present circumstances. I believe that love can be forgotten, hidden, buried, thrown in a closet and covered with old sheets to grow dusty and disused. But not destroyed.
There are those that I do not like, and still love. There are those that I will never like, and still love. There are those who will never believe, and I still love. Even those that have sent me away, sent me packing for their reasons or mine, I still love. I always will, as long as there is a breath in my body and a heart that still beats.
Perhaps I'm a romantic.
I also believe that one cannot 'fall' in love. Love is, to me, something that happens. To fall 'in' love indicates to me that love was waiting in a spot and then, magically one finds it. I believe you can fall 'in' like. Love may generate from that falling in like, but I don't believe that one can fall 'in' love.
I also believe that there is no such thing as a 'soul mate'. Either we are all 'soul mates' or none of us are. We either love or we do not. 'Soul mate' is a romantic notion that there is 'only one' out there for a person. Ridiculous. Where is your first crush? Where is your last? Where is your next?
Until one has met everyone on the planet, I believe it is impossible to say "You and only you, and no others" with any measure of self-honesty. Humans are very good at self-delusion. It gives us great comfort to believe our own lies.
I believe we are all soul mates, on one level or another. I may just not have met everyone yet.
So here is my take on love.
Love expecting nothing. Love without question or doubt. Love without ego and desire nothing, neither the return of that Love nor proof of that Love. Love as if you are dying, and right now is your last moment. Accept Love as being, because it exists.
Accept Love as a worthy offering FROM you, because you will love. Love comes as natural as life, and as you can love, do.
Accept love as a worthy offering TO you, and treat it gently and with confidence. YOU are worthy to be loved, and you are loved, without doing anything at all to deserve it save simply existing as you are.
Do not simply believe in love. KNOW Love is, and that it is yours to give.
We are all Soulmates. We are all worthy to love. We are all worthy of love.
Here's a bit of my take on it, for what it's worth.
Love is a feeling. An emotional reaction to stimuli, both environmental and chemical that affect our mental and physical states. Boiled down medically and scientifically, it is a psycho-physical reaction created by the body in reaction to an outside stimulus, real or imagined.
This does not remove the mystery, nor does it remove the wonder of it all.
We, as human beings, are, at the root of it all, at our core, selfish things. We live to keep ourselves alive. Our entire being is devoted to this. Survival. It is, from conception, what we do. We strive to be alive and survive.
So why do we risk it all by Loving others?
Not things, because I have a firm conviction that we don't love things. We desire them or covet them. Of course, there are those who say they 'love' icecream. Or love that new car smell. Or love money. That's not love. That's desire of ownership.
Loving other living beings (and this includes animals and possibly plants) is, in my mind, the desire to commune. To be a part of. To share and be shared. This is how I see loving, which is different from love itself. The verb is not the noun. The act of breathing air is not air.
It is entirely possible to lead ones life and love all that are there to love, and never express that love in a purely open way. It may not be much fun, but I believe it is possible. Or, it may be as much fun as one wants.
Religious sects claim to love all, and there are some members of these sects I'd like to believe who can love all chastely, without having met the object of that love.
Love, therefore, may very well be something that can be generated by an internal stimulus as well. It may be that love, in whatever form it takes, doesn't require much effort at all to spring into existence. It may be that love is a self-generating delusion.
Regardless, Love is. It is an emotion, a feeling, an irrationality.
I've heard love is a gift. The Gift of Love. That may be. In my mind, though, love is not a gift. It is not something that can be wrapped up and given. It is not something that can be separated from the giver. It can be offered, and it can be excepted or rejected, but it can't be given. It isn't something that you can put on your shelf, nor is it something that is always readily visible. Love is not a gift, but it can be an offering. They are two distinct things.
If I gift a person, I pass something from me to them. It leaves me and is theirs, to do with as they wish. Granted, this might seem like what happens to love. We give it away and if it is real, it comes back to us, yes? No. Love, regardless of the recipient, never truly leaves us. Love is like a never ending string that starts with our emotional well being and if accepted by another, connects us to them. But it never, ever, truly leaves us. The love we feel is part and parcel of who and what we are.
Love is an offering. I offer this part of me to you. If you accept it, it will connect us in a way that I am not connected to any other being. If you do not accept it, the love will still be there, and I will still be connected to you, because I will still love you.
It is not a requirement that love be returned. Love that requires anything is not love, it is a demand, it is emotional blackmail. Love has no promise of reciprocation, no promise of 'return to sender'. Any such belief that love has a promise of return is a lie. That is the illusion of our want. That is the manipulation of our desires.
Love is. Love exists. Love is a feeling towards some other being. The reasons we love are as complex and as simple as the persons we are. There are those I love simply because they exist. There may be things or events in their existence that prompt that love, and the enumeration of what those things may be would wear me out counting them, and bore anyone that cares to listen. The reasons may be very small, but there are, I believe, countless numbers of those small things.
Love does not take large things into reason. Love does not take small things into reason. Love does not reason at all.
I am going to give a simple example. I have a friend who lives many miles away. This is a person that nobody that knows me has met in person. She found, when she was very young, that she had breast cancer. She was 28, and had two small children and had just divorce a very verbally and physically abusive husband. She also found out that her ex-husband was bi-sexual (which may cause some of you to shrug and say 'So?', but there is an importance in it). She beat back the cancer for nearly 20 years, and now it's back. She has lived with this disease for all her fully adult life, and she continues to struggle with it through numerous treatments and setbacks and weakness and all the horrible, horrible things that has happened to her mind and body.
There are other very negative things that have happened in her life, and though very, very important to her, and while having a serious effect on her ability to fight back the depression that impending death causes, matters not one whit to those who don't know her.
I met her while I was working the phones in Customer Service. I answered the phone with my typical "This is Chester, what may I do for you?"
She answered "You can pay my bill." And then she laughed.
We spoke for about twenty minutes that call. I found ways to help her save money, for which she thanked me, and then she extracted a promise from me... a promise to call her that night. She was at a conference in San Francisco, and she didn't know anyone. She didn't ask me to call her. She simply said, "Call me tonight", and then gave me her number.
I broke protocol and pushed some ethical boundaries and called her that night. We have been friends now for going on 5 years. I have met her once, when she was in Oklahoma City. Just once, for four hours. There was no sex involved, and the night ended with me kissing her cheek and hugging her. I will always remember those four hours and hold them in my heart because they contained love in their essence, as pure as possible.
Do I know she felt the same way I did? No. I have no clue as to what she felt. Even if I had asked her, her answer would have been colored by my asking of the question. Her answer would have been irrelevant. I KNOW that I loved her that night, as purely as I can.
This is a person I love and love as deeply as I love anyone. There is, in me, only one depth to love and only one way to love. I love as deeply as possible and unconditionally.
Love does not place or make restrictions. Love is mindless. It either is, or it isn't. Love does not have degrees. Anything less than the loving fully is not love. It is the lesser feeling of like, in varying degrees.
Why do I love this person? A thousand, thousand reasons. Do I love everything about her? Yes, because it is impossible, to me, to love only a part and not the whole.
Do I like everything about her? No. We have major issues on religion, as I have none and she is very devout to hers. I also have a major issue with homophobia. I see no rational reason for it, and she is very much homophobic. This would preclude any sort of long term habitation. What I don't like about her is as irrelevant to my love of her as marshmallows are to the swallows in Capistrano.
Love doesn't care about like. Like varies. I used to like plumbs and crab-apple jelly. Now I find them horrible. I used to absolutely dislike broccoli, but now I find I rather like it under the right circumstances. I do not like beer, but I drink it because when I am with my friends, whom I love, the fact that I dislike beer doesn't matter one bit.
I love my friend's strengths, and I also love my friends weaknesses. It would be too easy to say I don't love her homophobia and that I don't love her religious devotion. In fact, I love those things about her, as well. Although I do not and may never agree with her choices, she stands by her beliefs with conviction and solidarity. It is her strength and her weakness.
I understand where some of her feelings come from, and that understanding comes from hours of talking openly to each other about not only what is comfortable but that which is also uncomfortable. Love inspired the trust to step out of my circle and into hers, knowing that I couldn't fail. I trusted my love of her would keep my mind open to her feelings. I knew that I may never agree with her, but I trusted that I would love her enough to listen, and to talk.
Never once did I wonder if I would lose her love. That I might never occurred to me because I love her. It doesn't make her love any less important. It is just that I did not require her loving me to be able to love her. Her loving me is an glad effect that I treasure, and I would love her regardless of it.
Love isn't trust. Love may inspire trust. And that trust may lead one astray and cause pain and doubt and damage. Many terrible things have been done to those who love by those whom they love. The manipulator used the love and devotion (two different things) they saw and took advantage of that trust (also different from love) to achieve a desire (also very different) they felt they needed to achieve for whatever reason they felt they needed to achieve it.
This is an illustration of the human mind to let the illusion of love cloud their vision. It is what happens when one has the expectation that love will be returned. It is what happens when one has the fear that love will not be returned. It has been said that some 'Will to anything for Love", even if the things that are done are debasing and self-destructive.
Love has no illusion. The illusion is desire. The illusion is expectation. The illusion is that love requires or demands anything. The illusion is that if one loves hard enough and proves that love, then that love will be returned. There is no promise of return of love. There is only the love that one feels. There is no proof of love. Love simply is.
That love cannot be destroyed is still an unknown to me. Can love be destroyed? Can the object of that love be so terrible, be so manipulative and destructive that love itself fails? Or has the dislike and the disdain of the object of love grown so large that it overshadows any love that was felt to the point that the love has the illusion of being destroyed. Can indifference actually exist after one has loved? I do not think so.
I would like to think that love cannot be destroyed. I would like to think that the reasons love existed in the beginning still exist, and will continue to exist, regardless of the current or past or present circumstances. I believe that love can be forgotten, hidden, buried, thrown in a closet and covered with old sheets to grow dusty and disused. But not destroyed.
There are those that I do not like, and still love. There are those that I will never like, and still love. There are those who will never believe, and I still love. Even those that have sent me away, sent me packing for their reasons or mine, I still love. I always will, as long as there is a breath in my body and a heart that still beats.
Perhaps I'm a romantic.
I also believe that one cannot 'fall' in love. Love is, to me, something that happens. To fall 'in' love indicates to me that love was waiting in a spot and then, magically one finds it. I believe you can fall 'in' like. Love may generate from that falling in like, but I don't believe that one can fall 'in' love.
I also believe that there is no such thing as a 'soul mate'. Either we are all 'soul mates' or none of us are. We either love or we do not. 'Soul mate' is a romantic notion that there is 'only one' out there for a person. Ridiculous. Where is your first crush? Where is your last? Where is your next?
Until one has met everyone on the planet, I believe it is impossible to say "You and only you, and no others" with any measure of self-honesty. Humans are very good at self-delusion. It gives us great comfort to believe our own lies.
I believe we are all soul mates, on one level or another. I may just not have met everyone yet.
So here is my take on love.
Love expecting nothing. Love without question or doubt. Love without ego and desire nothing, neither the return of that Love nor proof of that Love. Love as if you are dying, and right now is your last moment. Accept Love as being, because it exists.
Accept Love as a worthy offering FROM you, because you will love. Love comes as natural as life, and as you can love, do.
Accept love as a worthy offering TO you, and treat it gently and with confidence. YOU are worthy to be loved, and you are loved, without doing anything at all to deserve it save simply existing as you are.
Do not simply believe in love. KNOW Love is, and that it is yours to give.
We are all Soulmates. We are all worthy to love. We are all worthy of love.
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Date: 2009-04-10 10:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2009-04-10 03:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-10 11:04 pm (UTC)It isn't that I am not supposed to love as other people do. I'm not wired that way. I can't love that way. For me, I must love all of you, or none of you. I choose all of you.