Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Someone asked me how I would define "love" today
Never mind who was asking, I was just amazed that anyone would want to know my opinion on the matter! After all, I've never been in love. The closest I ever came was not a reciprocal thing, and it didn't last long, so I am by no measure an expert on the subject. That said, as is probably no surprise to anyone who knows me, I did have a response.
In my uneducated opinion, love as a word has no definition. It is far too abstract and subjective an experience. The dictionary says something to the effect of "strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties" or "attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers" or "affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests". For my money, love is defined by the experiences attached to it. Something like a blackhole would make an appropriate analogy, in that you cannot see it, but its astrophysical presence is born out by the effect its incredible mass has on everything around it.
For me, this is a relatively simple concept to grab hold of. In my limited experience, love is a pervasive sense of being 'at ease' when the object of your affections is in your presence. With the aforementioned ex, there was a brief period when simply seeing her made me want to smile. When she was nearby or on my mind, things were lighter. My mind is always racing with traffic, but when she and I were together, it settled into a steady rhythm and I felt completely relaxed. Definitely a rare experience for me in relation to another person.
In my life, that is more than enough. There's really nothing more to ask beyond what can be given freely, i.e. honesty, loyalty, affection, etc. Being content with those things would seem to indicate the presence of love, at least in my mind. For some, it is a monumental, insurmountably complex, and impossibly intricate thing. I picture their minds functioning like a tax audit procedure, with dozens of twists and turns strung together as a means of "proving" love's presence. Can that be what love is? Do we have to prove our love, like we prove some lifeless math calculation? Is real love a test we have to pass on a rotating basis? Not in my mind. In my eyes, that is the byproduct of insecurity and fear, not a love.
Love, as a feeling, should be inspiring, pleasing, and serve as a buttress against the onslaught of bullshit constantly spewing forth from the world at large. Is always having some sort of conflict or stress lingering over every conversation? Is it constantly being questioned, or having to question yourself? Not in my mind, but then my perpetual monk status should probably serve as a barometer of just how accurate my understanding of love is!
The greatest irony, or cruelest, is that something so incredibly simple is so impossibly hard to find in a world like ours. That's nothing new, of course, but then nothing is under this sun.
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