As the years go by I realize I have probably talked about the common themes for each month or season a couple times over in the nearly six years of writing this column, especially when it comes to the holiday ‘season’ of October through February, which allows articles on Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and of course the star of this month’s theme, Valentine’s Day.
That of course means talking about love, the one feeling that no one can really live without, no matter how much they may say they can.
But what is love?
Mankind invented the alphabet and language skills to be able to better communicate desires and intentions to the other people around us, but it is still a pretty clunky system, like doing calculations for a space shuttle launch on an abacus, especially when it comes to words that seem like such absolutes like love or its less desirable sister of hate.
Love can have many forms, from platonic love for your best friend to the unbreakable bond and love between a mother and her child or the love a fan may have for a sports team of certain genre of fiction.
All are valid forms of love and although all the above examples are varied and scattered across the human experience, they all have a string connecting them.
The emotional impact that cannot be expressed when something or someone, not even just limited to ‘things’ but when even a moment, a night, a dawn reflected in the eyes of our greatest passions can bring on a sense of all being right in the world, things just make sense for once, for that brief period people have labeled the ‘salad days’ back in the past, be it the first time you were with the love of your life or that perfect Summer of your youth that you did not know was perfect then that makes you smile.
Impacts like those are what make love and being loved one of the best experiences in life and also can cause love of the unwanted and unrequited kind bring up the opposite of feelings, so strong is the magnitude of the emotion, that it can fill us with light or leave us longing in the dark.
However, for something to be born so dark, it must have fallen from a great source of light.
Hardest of all to achieve is the greatest love of all, which is self-love and should never be mistaken for arrogance or someone who appears on the outside to be perfect and have it all figured out, but might just not be all they seem to be.
I suppose because from the time we are born till the time we all die we all look for some form of love, it makes it one of the most encompassing desires across the entire planet, taught by our prophets no matter the religion, at the heart of our wildest dreams of a perfect governmental system is the society based love we hope we one day achieve for our fellow man.
Hopefully this soon will mean that as we all desire love in one of its many guises, it should become easy to both give that love out and receive it ourselves.
