Love is something if you give it away,
Give it away, give it away.
Love is something if you give it away,
You end up getting more.
Love. The story of my life. For some people, life feels an accomplishment through their career, or the amount of money they make. Maybe it’s vicariously through the children they bring into this world. It’s the oldest cliché in the book, but for me, it’s all about Love.
Through all these years that I have experienced and sought this holy grail of mine, I’ve gone through those inevitable ups and downs that have taught me where my beliefs were wrong or my feelings ill-placed. Accordingly, I’ve also gone through many stages of anti-love, where I swore that I would remain single and dedicate my life to more practical realities, rather than chasing after a fairy-tale that led me to the middle of nowhere. What these phases of so-called self-professed anti-love taught me was that it’s really ingrained in me. That my motto I’d lived so many years and cast away, was really stuck to me permanently: Live to love, love to live.
It's just like a magic penny,
Hold it tight and you won't have any.
Lend it, spend it, and you'll have so many
They'll roll all over the floor.
The overall picture meant one person. But love means everything and everyone, and most importantly yourself. I had to come to terms with the fact that love didn’t mean finding someone else to make you feel accomplished. Love had to start with “I”.
And what I realized was that, instead of just holding out for that one person one day, I had to wear it every day, for myself. When I did that, I found that noone else was able to take my vulnerabilities and use it against me -- I didn't give them that permission. I stopped searching for love and stopped persuading myself - always prematurely and in the wrong places - that I found it.
Being in love with the idea of love is a dangerous thing. You should love love. But you cannot expect that it will fluourish where you decide is a convenient place for it to do so. It doesn't happen just like that, you cannot plant a seed in concrete and expect it to grow. And you can't keep pouring more and more onto that seed in hopes that it will. Because what you're doing is pouring more expectation onto your hope, and in doing so, you're meanwhile drowning out that one hope as well as forgetting to feed the rest of your plants.
No matter how much love you know you have to give, and no matter how much you seek that soulmate and companion, you still need to remember that every step along the way to wherever and however you're getting there needs some attention. Put a little love into the next spot you need to step, let it grow and keep you stable so that you can cross to the next. Love isn't something you can keep aside in the fridge for that feast you expect you'll have one day; you need to come to the realization that however much you use, you have much more to replenish it with. That's when you can appreciate and recognize the live wire connection between life and love.
You need to find it in the smallest things, the everyday things, before it will show up in the greatest place of all. The way the wind blows, or how the rain falls, the people around you --and most importantly in and for yourself. You need to extend your ability to love even the mundane moments, inject it into the actual spark of life.
When we love, we always strive to become better than we are.
When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho
