Love




Love, such a commonly used word. We all know what it means. An intense like for something, a feeling of attraction etc etc. In today's colloquial parlance, we "love" anything and everything. Right from the pizza with extra cheese topping to the new dress that we brought. We love our new haircut, we loved the trip that we took last year, we love that actor and we love hanging out with friends.  We love the rain and we love that cup of coffee. And then, we also go around, holding this love as a precious burden in our heart for that one person we "love".

Isn't this funny? If love is so easy, so commonplace in our lives, then loving should also be equally easy, right? And this so called love, as we know it, should be liberating. It should only bring us joy and peace and contentment. But many times, especially when it is latched on to people, all it does is bring heartache. Oh, the misery is all too familiar, isn't it? The way our heart broke when our first love withered away. The way we puttered around, missing our dear pet which we loved so much, but is not there with us anymore. The way our heart clenches in pain when we think of our friends or relatives whom we were so close with, but are no longer a part of our life. The way our chest explodes in pain when the one we love so much throws anger and bitterness  our way and makes us cry for days together. Those moments, when the pain becomes almost unbearable, we all have vowed so many times to not love again, never to give our heart away, protect it with a wall, a fortress even, to keep it beating safe and sound. Oh, but this foolish foolish heart, it never learns.

But the best part is, the human heart doesn't know how to be without love. Loving, is truly as easy and as involuntary as breathing. It is something that comes naturally to us. Honest! If we quieten our mind, only for a little bit and silence all that chatter that goes on up there, and just focus our attention to our heart, then we all can  feel this love flowing from us, all around us, towards everything and everyone. This love, so pure and free, flows without any expectations in return. It transcends the likes and dislikes of our mind, it is beyond the beauty and forms perceived by our senses, it is there, just like the sky above us. No attachments, no expectations, so beautiful and so powerful, this love is there for us...for all of us...from all of us. Just like how we need to look up at times to realize the beauty and feel the presence of the sky above us, every once in a while, we just need to look inwards, to tap into this abundance of love that we all hold within us.

Comments

  1. Marlin Jar16 July 2016 at 22:33

    Beautiful thoughts beautifully expressed. A friend of mine lives by her personal maxim, "It's not important who or what you love, only that you love." She is the happiest creature I've known and probably the only person I envy.
    Half the misery in the world stems from people afraid of letting love take over their soul. (Oscar Wilde puts this differently in wonderful words in Des Profundis. Will pull them up some time.)

    Have you seen Interstellar? You reminded me of its characters saying love is the fifth dimension transcending space and time. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. a16 July 2016 at 22:39

    Ohh! That is fabulous. that she can do it so effortlessly! people often confuse love with romance. Love is beyond a people and individuals. It's a universal truth :-)

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  3. a16 July 2016 at 22:42

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. Marlin Jar26 July 2016 at 04:33

    As promised, from De Profundis, a letter Oscar Wilde wrote from behind bars to the man responsible for his imprisonment.

    "Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole: by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed love. But anything will feed hate. There was not a glass of champagne that you drank, not a rich dish that you ate of in all those years, that did not feed your hate and make it fat. [...] Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the writing on the remotest star; but hate so blinded you that you could see no further than the narrow, walled-in and already lust-withered garden of your common desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character, was entirely the result of the hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently, and in secret, hate gnawed at your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant, till you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and the most petty aims. That faculty in you which love would have fostered, hate poisoned and paralysed. [...] But I said to myself: ‘At all costs, I must keep love in my heart. If I go into prison without love what will become of my soul?’ [...] After my terrible sentence, when the prison dress was on me, and the prison house closed, I sat amidst the ruins of my wonderful life, crushed by anguish, bewildered with terror, dazed through pain. But I would not hate you. Every day I said to myself: ‘I must keep love in my heart to-day, else how shall I live through the day?’ "

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  5. a17 September 2016 at 20:43

    Ohhh, so beautiful! Thanks, Nirmal.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Unknown21 July 2017 at 00:19

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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