I've been thinking about love. Not just romantic love or brotherly love, friendship or sex, but all of it. What is love? Where did it come from? Why do we love? Why don't we love? Is love just an evolutionary phenomenon that has developed to further our species? Did an all-powerful being create love and give it to us or is love a reason for our creation? Or maybe love was simply invented by corporate America to sell us more chocolate.
Whatever the case, love is undeniably a powerful thing. Love has incredible power. It inspires books, movies, songs, music...it inspires people to accomplish amazing feats just as it sustains people through the agony of great defeats. Love may have inspired life itself. Love is powerful, but as any power can be, it is also dangerous.
Love: Joy. Warmth. Passion. Peace. Beauty. I associate these words with love because I have experienced them alongside and within love. But, there is danger even in these pleasant words... whenever you have these things, you also have the danger of loss, and in loss we often find pain. The greater a love, the deeper the hurt when we lose it. Then there is the danger we find when love is corrupted. Jealousy. Sadism. Too much love for the wrong thing (power, money, country, race) and we find ourselves at war. Love; powerful, but dangerous.
So what next? Become a hermit and hide from love? Miss out on the joy and hope that love can be in order to avoid that danger and escape the pain and hurt that love can leave you in? Become a cynic, deny love? Pretend that this thing that people laugh and sing about doesn't really apply to you and your world. The problem is you can't hide from it and you can't deny it, because it exists and it will find you. Embrace it? How? I don't have an answer to that question.... I just don't.
I do know my life without love... it's shabby. It's boring. And it's not worth a damn. As much danger as love puts you in, it's worth it for the excitement and joy that you get, in spite of any pain. I know that while losing a love, a lover, a loved one, hurts awfully, it couldn't hurt to lose it unless it had been something worth having.
"He who loves 50 people has 50 woes; He who loves no one has no woes." --Buddha
If that's true, if love and woe walk hand in hand...
then I'll take woe over no woe any day.