Love has been on my mind a lot in the past few weeks. What love looks like as a daughter, a sister, a friend. What loves looks like as a holding on, a making space, a letting go. Love is the single most courageous act that a person can choose, in any capacity.
Something has shifted in me over the last several months. I have written about love before, but from an intellectual space. Maybe I didn’t feel safe enough to explore a concept that has been a source of joy and pain, peace and conflict without emerging with a solid understanding. I am not sure that what you will read here will evince that either, but I know I can’t NOT write about it any more.
For me, writing about love theoretically meant taking on an outsider’s perspective. It meant creating and maintaining an emotional distance to study something that is not altogether scientific. It meant deciding on variables and outcomes. For a while, it was quantitive, the sum of doings or not-doings that demonstrated love. It was such a quandary for me because the doing for did not always address the base need. The gesture, the doing was because of a perceived need, void, the personal determination that a sacrifice could bridge a gap that may or may not have existed in the mind of the receiver. Asking qualitative questions just led to more questions, because it often was an after-explaination, and words often pale in comparison to the depth and breadth of lived experience.
Lately, I have been getting more in touch with the feeling of it. I have the understanding that loving, choosing, to love, receiving love, and releasing love are the bravest things that any of us could choose to do. Collectively, they are the single more important undertaking any of us take on in this lifetime. The vulnerability the we don’t explain away. The pain we feel from being misunderstood, unappreciated, or when our capacity expands. The growing pains from evolving to more, the leaving of space for our beloveds to choose to grow or not. The resulting temporary or permanent separation of what we are feeling and what we are living. The people who come and go. The compassion, the filtering through our perspectives, the sometimes resultant attempted emotional manipulation to hold on to something we cannot logically understand. The supporting of ourselves and others through these changes. The give and take, the understanding that even when our need aren’t whole met, it doesn’t mean that our partner’s, or child’s, friend’s, or family member’s needs are being met. The meeting left of, right of, or no-where near center. The laying-bare, the busting open, the rawness.
It is courage, pain and beauty. It is finding and owning your own-truth. It is sharing it quietly, loudly. It is being understood and misunderstood. It is sympathy and empathy. It is life.
I'm just telling you how I see it 