Love: A Thought on Its Meaning
The understanding of love varies between us. We love our dog. We love our family. We love music and TV Shows. We love our boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife. We use the word as a transferable depiction of emotion across dimensions, and it makes me think that most of us have absolutely no idea what love is, and how desperately we pretend to know.
It is hard to put into rational words this idea that causes entire civilizations to ponder and think about what it really means to be in love. I have come to understand that it is a much more individual and personal journey than we may realize. Our rational mind thinks that we love those who love us, that we care for those who care for us, that we are kind to those who are kind to us. But we know love is not this simple. We know love in its purest form, is not rational. And we know as humans, we often do not love those who are kind to us. We often do not love those who care for us. We often do not love those who love us. We fail at understanding this concept at times because it truly is illogical, irrational, and beyond the bounds of our rational minds. For people to “love” those who harm them, and to leave those they “love,” are equally irrational and illogical. We curse those who we once told, “I love you.” We leave those who we once promised to be together with, “until death do us part.” We end a relationship and say, “I no longer love you,” as if love is so easily cast away. Our rational mind defends us from feeling what we all seek so desperately, and on that long awaited day we do, it tells us we are creating a fantasy, a fairytale story, or some fiction to make us feel more at home with the incomprehensible idea of finding peace with love. We cannot comprehend the depths of true love, and therefore believe we do not deserve it, for it is out of our grasp, and so we should settle for “reality,” or whatever is currently present in our lives.
There is nothing else that matters in this life but love, and nothing that gives our lives more purpose than the lifelong quest of defining what love means to us.
As we mature, we understand that love has no timeline, it has no idea of rational thought, it knows nothing but our deepest and most sacred desires. In that way when we experience it, if we have walked our individual journey far enough, we are equipped to trust and believe love has found us, because we understand exactly why we feel this way. At that point, we must trust our intuition, our experiences in life that tell us the intangible. As we see people not as our girlfriend, or wife, or father, or mother, or sister or brother, or our toxic ex, but as human beings who all want the same thing, we begin to understand. We are all hurting. We all want to be desired. We all want to be cherished. We all want to be understood and listened too, and there is no timeline for when we feel these things. We begin to see love not as a concept to be shown, but one to be discovered, and like most great expeditions, typically, it is not done alone, but it must start with the personal decision to start asking the right questions, and to not settle for the status quo. When we see past this constructed “reality” built by the inner workings of our rational mind and society at large, we see what love can be for us. How it can transcend all knowledge, all definitions and previous understandings, and somehow in the deepest parts of our soul, we know the feeling to be real and true. Loving someone is simply showing up as the best version of yourself, but how do we know if this version now, is our best? We must seek to learn unrestricted by assumptions, criticisms, or selfish impulses, simply because we know those limiting characteristics don’t produce the best of anything. Love is absolutely selfless, and in that way, it is absolutely fulfilling. The mother who cares for her child night and day does so out of love. The older brother who consoles his sister, does so out of love. The wife who cares for her dying husband, does so out of love. There is no concept of self-seeking desires, there is no hope for anything in return, there is nothing but love. Love is totally illogical to those who have yet to experience it, but if I have learned anything in my life, it is that the feeling love gives you, is all life is about, and all any of us need.
