Love, Actually...

Google the word "love" and you come across images of hearts, couples holding hands, love letters, wedding blogs, love quotes, sob stories, and overall, it's either relentless heartache emoness or vomiting rainbows.

I think I'm speaking accurately here when I say that it is the most commonly sought-after thing in the world. Most everyone wants it, everyone is looking for it, one way or another. You may not always be talking about it, but you know you want it.

Ever paused after that train of thought to wonder why?

I'm fortunate enough to say that yes, I have.

The world feeds us with the idea that love is the most powerful thing in the world. Take this particular quote from the oldest book still in publication; The Bible:

Love is patient; love is kind

and envies no one.

Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude;

never selfish, not quick to take offense.

There is nothing love cannot face;

there is no limit to its faith,

its hope, and endurance.

In a word, there are three things

that last forever: faith, hope, and love;

but the greatest of them all is love.

And I actually believe this to be mostly true, but not pertaining to the same "love" that it is

always associated with. I don't need to mention this; it's common knowledge, but this quote is always addressed to husband and wives. To people who have decided to embody the romantic coupling bandwagon, hook line and sinker. It's the quintessential Christian wedding quote.

But looking deeper, one may find, more often than not, that this "love", actually, is the accumulation of different levels of these things:

• The opportunity to replenish one's sense of self by caring for another
• strong attachment
  
• Intellectual symmetry
• Sexual -ok, ok fine- physical attraction
• Gratification of miscellaneous preferences
• Retained interest
• Smooth-flowing circumstances ("smooth" being relative to what one considers exciting)
• Serendipitous "accidents"
• Chance encounters
• Cultural compatibility
• Concentrated and maintained focus on the person
• Chemical compatibility

All of which are based on the person's/our encounters with the person's ability to retain our wanting over it. (This does not make them seem bigger than they are, because what they are is anything you make them to be, and your reality may be only yours, but it is still, with respect, a reality) But the actual love that is synonymous with being all-powerful, all-encompassing, and "god" has got nothing to do with want at all.

Want-based "love", or "romantic love" always comes with its own weight's worth of hate, demonstrated really well by infamous Jealousy. Jealousy is both claiming possession and resentment. It drives you together just as much as it drives you apart.

As Eckhart Tolle says it, actual love has no opposite.

I used to subscribe to the notion that the opposite of love is fear, because it makes so much sense. But I realize now, that instead of being its opposite, it merely nulls the power of love. Instead of being black to white, it is an antidote to poison.

How could have the world come to this, if everyone really WAS looking for love, like it seems? It makes no sense at all. I think this is how some people have come to the conclusion that love is not something they believe in.

We have to realize that love only looks powerless now because what we are observing is not love. It is want, which is an ego-based urge. Something comparable to an addicting drug. It is the same thing that has caused this mess in the first place. Asking for more of it under a different mask: the mask of finding "fulfillment by finding a pair", is rubbing dirty salt on the wound.

So many words are overloaded with context nowadays. Destiny, God, Normalcy, Possession, Wealth... And most of these words and ideas only exist by our own will. They will die as concrete constructs once we let go of our need for them. It's like assigning a name to a child, and eventually caring for the name more than the child. And as we all know, a child is so much more than his name.

I have had glimpses of love, I am lucky enough to say. And they always come after I've let go of something. I don't believe that this is because lovers are meant to be losers, or because love is a losing game... I believe that this is because I was holding too tightly to some things, as if they were separate from me. There is nothing to lose: Love is realized when you realize that you are not separate from anything at all. All things are one. (Quite literally, actually. But that's another story.)

This being said, you actually can never be separated with love. Love is all that you are. You are made of it. Searching and longing for it is blindness to the truth, not proof of its absence.

Randy Pausch said that clichés are cliché'd for a reason. This couldn't be any more true. Love really can be found by looking inside yourself. Not outside.

Quite like the quest for what you believe in, the quest for love is like chasing your own tail. But it is what it is when we do what we do. *shrugs*

Random musings on my planner, March 16 2010:

"Love, real love, does not look for a "relationship" to validate or sustain itself. What that painful feeling is, the undeniable need to be with someone, to hold her in your arms, the need to know that she is yours, that is attraction. And it has varying intensities. It is merely want. Real love does not need anything. It is expressed, but does not need to be expressed. It does not need physical closeness, intimacy. It does not vary. It does not fade.

Attraction, interest, enchantment.

They will fade in time.

But love will not. Love does not.

Love has no point of destination. Togetherness does. Intimacy does. And attraction is hard to ignore. But only love can fulfill one deeply, and it's not something to look for.

It is something to realize.

It just is.

[PS: Maybe this is why the symbol for love is the heart, and not the brain. Think about it -no pun intended- : The brain speculates. The heart just is. The brain processes. The heart just beats constantly. And more importantly, any kind of addiction forms in the brain.]