Of all the emotions humans have, love seems to be the one we have the most trouble talking about. We seem able to agree about what it means to be sad, or angry, or happy. Love is complicated. It can lead people to say things like 'I only hit you because I love you.' It can take people to places where they act unkindly out of jealously. The pain associated with love can lead people to the most unloving actions imaginable.
I'm increasingly convinced that love is not an emotion. Love is a mix of emotions, and each of us makes that blend in their own way. For some people, lust is the primary feeling powering love, and when the lust burns out, the love leaves with it. For others, love is dominated by the need to give, to sacrifice and to take care of another being. Romantic love for a sexual partner is different from love for a friend, or familial love, but all of these things can be love. It depends on what your personal blend is.
For me, inspiration and love have always been entwined. Love inspires me, and when I am inspired I also love. For a lot of my life, love was measured in terms of pain and how much I was willing to endure for someone. At this point I am very deliberately taking that out of the mix. I am not going to love on those terms anymore.
I experience love as a warm, heart opening sensation. It is the joy of experiencing someone else's happiness, and the delight of things shared. It's full of acceptance, trust, and tenderness. It can be a very soft, giving sort of feeling, and also a fierce, passionate intense sort of feeling depending on who or what is inspiring it. I have no doubt that it is the best of me.
My suspicion is that we all make a lot of choices around what love means to us, how we express it and how we understand it. Most of those choices aren't made consciously and for many of us these things were learned in early childhood. So we grow up associating love with food, or with punishment, with affection or with pressure to achieve. In theory we all have the scope to change those stories and to reimagine what love means in our lives.
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