It must be Love

For years on end, one of the most exploited themes in literary and philosophical writing has been that of love. And it’s not just them; every individual grows up hoping that some day they will fall in love and that their love will be requited by someone special, at least once. With the popularity of the media, we are constantly exposed to varying notions of love and romance, so much so that it is almost mandatory that you fall in love. Of course besides the pressure from media, friends and family, there are times ranging from a lousy day at work to a chilly, winter evening or just the desire to share the overwhelming feeling of joy and happiness that one feels a need for love, a lover just to be able to share your sentiments, or at least the empty space right beside you on the couch. But in the midst of all the romanticism that goes around the idea of love or love itself, no one I know, including myself seems to know what love truly is. Perhaps everyone I know is strangely unlucky or may be unaware of the love in their life.

I suppose, love means different things at different ages. In primary school, love is about the one person who shared crayons because you forgot to bring your own. May be he/she happened to be your bench mate, and always shared their lunch with you. Or because he/she walked back with you everyday from school while you discussed the woes brought forth upon your lives by the complexity of algebraic formula. In college, love is the first ‘best friend’ of the opposite sex. Or may be the first one to notice your sense of humour or your ability to make interesting conversation that underlies the awkwardness you display because you just realized that you are not the ‘most sought after’ of the lot, be it a class of 100 or 20; and will probably never be either.

As we grow older, most of us have had our hearts broken in some way or the other. Either because your relationship(s) didn’t work out or because the one person whose attention you craved for decided to fall in ‘love’ with someone else. Perhaps you realized that relationships are more than just holding hands during class, making out in the movies or showing up at parties as a ‘couple’. Or simply that ‘love’ can happen again; that your belief in tales of waiting endlessly for love to be reciprocated was more a part of your naïveté than love itself. Cynicism is inevitable, for all. Those who thought they were in love or the ones who never had it requited, everyone starts to believe that love is nothing but a myth. That all that there is to it is an attraction driven by hormones, physical needs which must be met, irrespective of ‘love’ which you now think is meant for teenagers, not for adults like you.

I guess what none of us are willing to confess is that secretly we are all hopeful, that love might happen; that it is possible to love someone more than yourself. That is possible to find at least one person who loves you for who you are; whether you are dark or fair, fat or thin, deep or shallow. To this one person, it doesn’t matter that every time you’re dressed up, you look like you could walk the ramp or that you have a 5-figure-salary, because they find you more loveable when you have a running nose with a voice that actually resembles the croaking sounds of a frog.

In retrospect, love is not one thing or the other, there is neither better nor worse; for it was all a gamut of emotions that felt more real than reality itself. In the midst of changing definitions of what love possibly means to each of us, there is a feeling which is a constant, and that feeling is true. The feeling that their happiness means more to you than your own, the feeling that it would hurt you more to see them unhappy than yourself…the feeling that it is worth all the madness that it entails. That love is not always about togetherness, but the ability to love knowing that at the end of the day, all you might be left with is a broken heart and an empty space right beside you on the couch.

Sabotage

In different ways, they are both victims. They both take themselves too seriously. She? She overanalyzes situations to the extent of sabotaging everything that there is, willing to throw it all away at an impulse driven by an ambiguous feeling which she identifies to be best resembled by dissatisfaction. It is not hard to do, she has always been impulsive. But the stakes have never been so valuable before. She tries to create a match between an ideal and the reality and take the lag to be a problem. It works like this: take a perfectly jovial, loving conversation; ignore all intonations of affection but certainly remember the uncertain ‘hmm’ and the occasional calls missed by him to be the unanticipated doom in their togetherness.

He? He seems to be one to take things at his own pace. But his predominant style is to preserve what there is from the power of change and corrosion. The cynic in him never forgets that everything, including love is conditional and is based on concealing everything that makes us human. He too, attempts to create an ideal in their reality albeit differently. This too, is another recipe to sabotage any form of acceptance that lies before him, in the revelation of himself.

And it’s all a vicious cycle. They are both unable to identify where the problem truly lies. Is it her paranoia or is it his complacency? Or is it the miles that separate them? They don’t know.

But to me, they are mere victims. Victims of poor self esteem…She, who creates little obstacles to overcome, ones that to her seem like tests to prove his love for her…He, who tries too hard to do everything her way not knowing the abundance of undiscovered possibilities in himself, the ones that she fell in love with to begin with.

If only they were aware of how wonderful they truly are, they would’ve known that they are a match made in heaven.

I wonder

I often wonder what is the purpose of life?

Generations are born, people come, people go; each of them making some sense of their existence and their reality. Your agency lies only in your ability to make meaning for yourself. But largely, things are meaningless.

Perhaps each of us come into this world to make a contribution, do our bit and perish. May be there is a grand plan that is panning out; a plan that has nothing to do with you or me but has something to do with the order of existence. An existence that is layered with multiple meanings at multiple levels but you are unaware of this meaning itself.

May be meaning exists in relationships, in the bonds that we create in spite and despite the differences between us. Differences that can perhaps never be bridged except in the good faith we establish between us, the faith which perhaps exists in that little space between you and me.

Threshold

There is nothingness in everything.

I once saw a movie called ‘into the wild’ and I liked a quote which I had scribbled in my notebook and forgotten about. It goes, ‘the core of man comes not from human relationships but from experience’

This seems more meaningful than anything in the world at this moment. I’m overwhelmed by emotion not knowing where to anchor any of it. I can’t even identify the emotion. All I have is a residue that is merely short of rolling down my cheeks.

It’s one thing to theorize emotions, but it’s another thing to experience them. And I’m not sure which one came first. But theory and experience only just seem to have formed an incomprehensible unified whole.

Moment of Clarity

Education in our lives is always an obvious ‘choice’. From school to high school to college; you’re not really expected to think about the fact that you have to study, you just do. But after graduation, there is a possibility that you might have to pause and think, ask yourself where you want life to head. That’s when I decided I should study further. In retrospect, I realize that more than anything, I was looking for meaning. But a master’s degree in Sociology can’t really do much for anyone’s philosophical quest. All it can do is look pretty on the CV and get you a 5 figure salary. Not that, I was very hopeful about the job lending meaning to my existence but it was worth a shot. But as it turned out, that almost a year in the job and life seemed even more pointless. And today, when I’m back to doing something I really like (which should technically restore my faith in the world); I experienced life in its absolute meaninglessness. There is no point to anything; I don’t know what people are doing and where people are headed. I don’t know why there is any reason to wake up in the morning and go about doing things like we always do. And for a change, I don’t feel like I have a problem. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the world and its ways. I don’t know why no one can change it. I guess agency and everything else around it is a myth. We’re not really agents of anything. We just go about living life in the setting we’re in and sooner or later, we shall all perish. I suppose everyone in life goes through this crisis at some point in their life. But I only just experienced it. Someday, I hope, you will too.