Love or The Idea of Love.
" You know, it’s quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness.
There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don’t do it.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Procrustes & Theseus
Whether we know it or not, Love or the idea of love has been brutalised, bastardised and misconceived at best.
Whether it's through the well-intentioned but ill-conceived notion from our parents or the glorification and gross misrepresentation through the media, chiefly Hollywood, our innate sense of love has been culled, trimmed, shaped even castrated to fit the proverbial Bed of Procrustes.
The fable of the evil Procrustes who ran an inn in the middle of nowhere, sat and entertained his guests with food and wine until they were satiated and drunk then he'd 'fit' them onto his iron bed by tying their limbs to the four corners of the bed and chopping them off if they were too long or stretching them out if too short. This gruesome scenario pretty much sums up how we were educated and how we educate our young on everything including love.
The idea of love may have worked for some who have gone before us, but they would be the exception because overall results then and now are far from satisfactory seeing the increasing rates of separation, divorce and conflict amongst family. The root cause of all the pain and suffering is the idea of love preached from the onset, was one of a conditional or transactional kind. "I will love you only if you always make me happy.." or "I love you but you need to change your habits...”or better yet "I will love you if you obey me.." Most of us have seen or heard these words uttered in front of or behind the children.
When love becomes a transaction, it is commercialised, monetised, prostituted, and sold to the highest bidder. That's why some people wear their spouses like badges, as arm-candy and acquisitions who are willing (or unwilling) participants in this charade. Until...
When the music dies, the lights go down, the curtains fall, in the quiet moments we feel a sense of emptiness, dissatisfaction, dis-ease, even despair and doubt if the person we've ended up with, truly knows us or loves us. Or whether we truly know or love the person we've committed to spend a lifetime with? In short are we happy? The answer is perhaps no. Simply because if happiness is tied to another, to an external entity, how can anyone be happy?
True happiness comes from within. Like love it starts from within.
Loving oneself must precede loving anyone else. Even loving your parents is self love because without their care, we couldn't survive. That in part is why we came here alone, to go out into the big bad world alone, loving and taking care of oneself instead of relying on others. Taking care of oneself invariably leads to knowing oneself.
When one is truly and fully acquainted with oneself, one is then fully and truly comfortable with oneself to be or live alone, even in solitude. There is no need for company for one discovers that one is better off alone than in unwanted company. One then is able to listen deeply within to discern between thoughts and feelings, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, success and failure, right and wrong and not be swept away by all these imposters. One learns to overcome the craving for another's company, for reciprocity, fear of rejection, social validation, because once self love is installed, self worth and independence is realised.
Then the individual understands that to love another, one must first love oneself, then turn one's attention to the other. One begins to understand the other, listening to what is being said and observing everything that is happening in the other. In short to be fully present is to be fully engaged with the other. Only when one truly understands the other, can one fully appreciate the other and love unconditionally.
~ A Declaration of Unconditional Love ~
I love you as you are and for who you are.
I love you for all the pain you have suffered in this life or before, inflicted by others or by me.
When I say I love you it means that I love you unconditionally with no conditions whatsoever.
My love for you is purely that- my love for you, it requires not that you love me in return.
My love for you doesn't require that you be with me always but I shall be with you for as long as you want me to, as long as I can.
I love you as I see and love myself in you. For there is no greater love than loving oneself.
Unconditional love is the holy grail of love that frees us from the fetters than bind us to each other.
Love is love, unconditional or otherwise, to love is to be free.
Freedom of expression, of movement, of choice and freedom to love others.
Procured only after deep understanding of self and the other, against the backdrop of this ephemeral world, we understand that it is the soul's purpose for liberation, to be free, not to be bound to anything or anyone.
Because the self is only limited to a body and a mind made of this world, whereas the higher self transcends body and mind, seeks the oneness to return, from whence we came.
" Fall in love with yourself, with life, and then with whomever you want." ~ Frida Kahlo.
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