Love changes everything.
From your first crush as a young pup in grade school to your first teenage heartbreak where the world was undoubtedly over; to that solemn life-altering moment you truly realize what your heart is capable of to that day you, literally, feel as though you’ve lost a part of your self. If not all of your self.
Love changes everything.
For most, our introduction to Love is really when our heart finds its first romantic beat. That’s not to say it negates the love we may or may not have experienced throughout our earlier formative years. No, not at all. But, Love of the romantic variety is different than the love that comes from, or goes to, a person that shares the same last name or DNA as us. There’s almost an inherent expectation of that love for no other reason than that’s all we’ve ever known up to that point in life. You love your parents, you love your grandma, you love your brother or sister (when you’re not saying you “hate” them); it’s nearly rote. But, then enters this “new” type of Love.
It’s not the type of love where, when you say it, you feel like a dork because your mom tells you you’re supposed to after your grandma gives you that sweater she knitted with the too long sleeves and the too short body, for Christmas. It’s not that.
It’s not the sloshy “I love you, man” love or the “I love pizza” bumper sticker love. It’s not that, either.
It’s the Love that when you say it for the first time, your palms are probably swamps and your heartbeat is in your throat and you’re mega worried if you’re going to hear it back. (You never worry if grandma is going to say it back, right?). It’s the Love that can, literally, make us or break us. It’s the Love that can make feel like we can climb the tallest mountain, or that the mountain has just been dropped on our chest. It’s that Love.
2019, hey?
Love changes everything.
Romantic Love, the Love we’re all wired for, teaches us a lot. Maybe even everything, if we’re paying good enough attention. It shows us what humans are truly capable of. It shows us its power. And, like all power, this one, too, can be used for good and for not-so-good.
To Love and to be Loved are, very much, the most beautiful gifts there are. I’d bet, if someone counted the number of songs, poems, books, stories and letters there are about Love, it would outnumber every other subject combined. What’s that tell us?
Love motivates us to do things we’d never do for any other reason. Not for wealth, not for popularity, not for fame and not for power. Because, Love is not any of those things. Real Love, that is. Real Love is everything that’s real. It is, without doubt, the one solitary phenomenon of our existence that brings the highest highs and the lowest lows. And, for that sheer fact, I am not capable to believe that there is anything greater in this Universe.
What happens, though, is that we think romantic Love fits in between its own narrow walls. Reserved for that special person we give our heart to and only that person. But, what the venture into romantic Love does is teaches our mind about the capacity of the heart. And, if we’re paying good enough attention, we can learn how to reverse engineer that Love. While the Love of our romantic partner is indeed special and distinct from any other type of Love, we have the ability to place the same force into all the Love in our lives. When you’ve been there, it’s never lost. It’s only by choice that we decide to shut it out.
I am, without doubt, ever grateful and ever greater for the Love that 2019 has brought me. And, everything else that went with it. That is the unwritten agreement of allowing Love into your life; you accept everything that comes with it. Absolutely everything. As much as I do believe in fairy tale endings, Love just isn’t only that. To know Love, we have to experience the full spectrum of colours it comes in whether they be bright, dull, vivid or opaque. That is the power that Love commands. Why? So as to remove any ambiguity, confusion or fleeting distraction as to why you are really meant to be here.
So, 2019; to say that Love has given a lot to me and taken a lot from me would be wrong. That wouldn’t be Love that did that. Love is always giving to us regardless of what external vicissitude presents itself. Even when the internal storm clouds us over, Love is always giving us opportunity. It gives us the opportunity to know what it is. It gives us the opportunity to know what we are. Everything.
Loves changes everything.
Be Love.
