One love

Do we know what love is?  Love enriches our lives…

During my teenage years, I did not understand what love is all about.  First of all, I never heard this word in my house.  The first time I heard the word ‘love’, it was in movies that I was very fond of watching.  Almost every movie seemed to revolve around love.  It was typically projected between a man and a woman.  There were feelings and emotions around love between the two genders and that would become the centre stage of all the happenings in life.

When I was trying to relate this word with my world, I couldn’t comprehend it.  I somehow assumed that love was supposed to happen with someone from the opposite gender and it should eventually manifest into marriage.  I may sound foolish but that is what I thought then.  My conflict with this word called love magnified when I didn’t know how to name my feeling towards my best friend, my sibling, my parents and so on.

As I grew past my teenage years, my understanding of the word love got expanded too.  I realised that love is to feel affection for something or someone.  It is the feeling of affection towards another.  Such a feeling is soothing, empowering and responsible towards the other.  I started enjoying this feeling as I am a fan of responsibility.  I was excited about all that I was feeling for the other.

My excitement was challenged when the other was not responding to my love.  Sometimes the other is neutral, at times very responsive to the point of magnifying my love for the other, and there were also situations where they were repelling my love with suspicion.  I got busy examining my love and its manifestations.  This was another trap I got into it, because I was trying to fit my love to others’ definition of it.

I was trying to change my approach and be the one that the other wanted.  This was initially easy and welcoming to the other.  But then, very soon, I started feeling something missing within me.  I felt I was getting away from myself.  Suddenly I could see myself different from me.  This was troubling because I was constantly dealing with the conflict.

How can love create a split within me?  Isn’t it supposed to be a manifestation and the extension of what I feel for the other?  I was confused because I just couldn’t deal with the gap, I had to encounter due to time, space and people when it came to love.  Every time when I was separated from a loved one due to time constraints or space constraints or even other people’s constraints, I felt a void created with my loved one.

The truest feeling of love is supposed to be the feeling of connection with the other at the deepest level.  It does not matter when it is expressed to the other.  But the fact remains that love is what emits from me and it does not shift into the manifestation of it.  What I realised about love is that it is like holding a basket of flowers and sharing one flower at a time with the other.  Sometimes the other would recognize what I was giving, at times they did not and some other times they may have wanted a different one.  At the core, I was giving what I have, and it was not the other way around.

Love is the manifestation of what I feel for the other (including myself) that is irrespective of the constraints caused by time, space and people.  In that sense, there is only one love.  This love is exclusively originating from me from the depths of my innermost feelings.  When I am operating from that one love, it never causes a disturbance to me.  In fact, it only embraces me with both hands and makes me stay intact and complete.  This love empowers me and eventually the other.

Such a love is independent of what the other is.  There is so much of patience in this love.  There is so much of depth in such love.  There is so much of tolerance in this love.  There is resoluteness in this love.  Such a love is so powerful that it can change the world.  At the core of it, such love is so unique to me and, at the other end, it is common for every human being.  It is one love for me and the same one love for the other in a different form.

There is no way I can measure or compare my love with the other.  Because I am holding a basket with a variety of flowers and sharing one at a time with the other.  What I give to one may not be the same as to the other in its form and shape, but my feeling of affection to the other is exactly the same.  This is something beyond time, space and people constraints.  Such ‘one’ love is deep, unique and universal!

In such love, there is peace, balance, power, empathy, patience and purpose.  When I operate from that love, it empowers me to become a better human.  Wow… what a life it is to cherish such love in this lifetime!

What I realised about love is that it is like holding a basket of flowers and sharing one flower at a time with the other.