What About Love

I make an earnest effort to improve myself; in word, thought and deed, and in my relationships.  I try to maintain this improvement continuously;  learning is a fundamental component of any positive change or growth.  I strive to always be open to new opportunities to learn.  Most especially from those closest to me.

Love, like identity is an ever present thought in my mind.  I would like to think I have learned something about love.  I have had many ideas about what love is, beliefs about what love could do.  There are songs, movies, books, and poems about love.  But ultimately, its all just a bunch of words.

In my mind, love was a bond holding two people together; making holding on through all the storms of life worth it.  Love was unconditional acceptance, unbridled desire to remain linked to the other, an emotional need for the others well being that surpassed selfishness.  Love was the strength to endure what ever may come.

Love might save a relationship, someone else's relationship.  There is no universal love.  Love is an emotion, but that emotion is whimsical at best.  Love is an idea.  It can be and attitude, an action, a motivation, a goal, but it is, and will always be an elusive ethereal idea.  That is it.

There is no divine love.  If you have love between you and another living thing, you might find something close to divinity.  In a few rare moments I have known such love.  Those moments were fleeting.

Mostly love is a lie.  A fallacy.  Even if it does not start out that way, invariably it ends up that way.  

I have spent the majority of my life's energy seeking loving, trying to cultivate love, trying to be loveable.  Yet I have had no firm concept of what love is, or how to nurture it.  I have sought understanding from those around me.  I have tried to love those around me in such a way as to inspire such great love and devotion that they would love me completely and unwaveringly.  But they are human.  I am human. Perhaps I am less human.  I have failed.

I have failed to endure, and thus failed to love enough.  I have no faith.  I have precious little hope.