Love

I went on a run tonight and as often happens when I’m out on the street in the dark I started thinking. This time I started thinking about what attracts me to a girl. I started thinking about the difference between the surface person, the one we show to each other and the inner person, the one we keep to ourselves because it is scary to let people see it, but also perhaps because we actually have not figured out the right way to express it. And to have someone misunderstand that, misinterpret that inner being, would be so much worse than if they had never been exposed to it at all.

Criticism is the most profound mask. It is a shield that lets us hold strongly to our outer selves while not letting anyone see that inner bit of us. It is probably the most superficial piece of ourselves, the things we don’t like, which makes it a great starting point. It is much easier to have a conversation with someone and find common ground around the things we dislike rather than the things we like. I can make a long list of the things I hate, and go on at length about them, but I can feel myself seize up at the prospect of explaining the things I love. The things I love are personal, and I’d hate for you to misunderstand them.

I don’t mean the things that we like though, the things we want. These are not us. I could tell you I like chocolate cake, that I’m craving ice cream. I can tell you how I would kill for a Ferrari or that I just have to move out of my parents house. Those things aren’t loves, they are needs that of course are not needed at all. If you asked a drug addict what he loved, and he said “I love heroine” you would probably just think he’d missed the point, he doesn’t love it, he needs it.

What I love? I love cooking, I love art, I love myth and stories, and religion. These things are things that drive me. They don’t pull me towards them, they push me forward, drive me towards higher and better being. This is what love is. You see when you love something it is something that makes you a better person.

But I don’t talk about love between people yet. Love between people seems complicated, so often we fall in love with the mask, with the superficial aspects of a person. And most of the time it becomes love of the former category, the love of needing, need to be with that person, do anything to be with that person, like addicts to a fix. Love of a mask is only a love of appearance. To love something like dance there is no choice, dance is not a thing, there is no body to hold on to, no cemented figure, dance is an expression, an experience, that is why it is easy to find the purest love in it. Same with art, same with anything of that caliber. Of course some people would spend a billion dollars on a painting by some famous artist effectively turning pure love of art into the need to have of pornography. What is art but that which afflicts us with awe, and what is porn but that which drives us to desire.

But when a person loves something tangible it can become very hard to see which is which, a person may love a car, may love it truly and thoroughly and spend hours a day washing it, working on the engine, driving it to feel it move under his hands, but a man who simple wants it will buy it, and spend hours making it pretty spend hours driving it around town. If the actions are the same but the motivation is different then it is not love, if he drives it around so that others may see it, if he cleans it because he wants it to be as perfect as the day he got it forever, if his motivation is to have, rather than to love the machine. Love will take the man who has the car to greater heights. And someday when he no longer has the car he will hurt, but his love of that car with have truly moved his life onward, it will have been about something. The man who simply wanted to have it will lose the car someday and be angry, angry at the money he lost, at the cost of a new car, but his life will not have changed, he will be the same person after the car that he was in the beginning.

When a person attacks something, says that’s too ugly, that’s too stupid, that’s too annoying, then you must see that these things are just nothing, they are not the real person, they are just a shield that they have constructed, but when some tells you about what they love, describes with every word they can muster the feeling they get when they are acting, dancing, painting, running, working or anything, and then their words trail off because they find there is no words, there never could be any words to express what it feels like to love something like they love, that is true love.

When a person is being drawn towards something and they devote their path towards getting there, getting money, getting the girl, getting a big house, getting what ever it is, and then that thing disappears, they are devastated, they are lost, their lives fall apart. But when a person has true love, love of a woman, love of art, love of life, love that dose not pull them put pushes them forward, towards the unknowns, towards faith and something they can’t know or explain yet. then even when that things disappears, they do not fall back, yes there is pain, with love there is always pain, but they will not collapse into nothing, they will not lose their life, they will see that they are strong for the love they were lucky enough to experience.

If a person tells you they don’t like something that you like a lot, and you get angry at them see it for what it really is, shields clashing against each other. Masks calling each other ugly. It is not really you, and it is not really them. This is why love exists beyond those things. This is why love seems so mysterious. When a person loves, wholly and truly, then you see them truly for the first time if you are able to look.

I once heard someone say “love is not a two person thing, it takes a lot of work to come to a place where you are capable of love, and if someone loves you back that is wonderful, but the other person is not what makes you love, it’s yourself, it’s your own soul that is loving. To accomplish that even for a moment, regardless of what anyone else responds with, is a miracle. If you love someone it says far more about you than it can say about them” Because when we love we are true, we can’t describe it, we can’t explain it, but when you love you are put in a place where you are utterly you, the deepest, strongest you there can be.