Musings on Love
Have you ever wondered to yoursef, "what is love?" Is love an intellectual ideal? Is it a state of mind? Is love the way you live? Does it reside in your actions? Perhaps, it is merely a thought. Yes, love can be a thought, it can be seen in your actions and the way you live, and it is both a state of mind and an ideal. However, though it be all these things, love is above all and emotion. Love is something that is felt and experienced; it is something that happens to you. Never fool yourself into thinking that you happen to love, it would be the equivilancy of you, as an individual, thinking you have an effect on the workings of the Universe, and yet, if you allow the force of Love to work through you, it is possible to alter the course of the Universe. If you doubt me in this then allow me to present my case in the names of Martin Luthor King Jr., Ghandi, Rosa Parks, John F Kennedy Jr., and Jesus the Christ, just to name a few. All of these souls, caught in the currents of Time and thrust down the River of History, with love in their hearts found the strength to stand up and like a rock, alter the course of Time and History, for the betterment of mankind. So, I ask you again, "What is love?"
Have you ever felt that thing in the center of your chest when you connect with another person? Remember the first time you fell in love? Take a moment to remember it. Do you remember how it felt? Do you remember that feeling that welled up in the center of your being and you felt so much joy that you thought your heart would burst? I've felt that and I believe that feeling to be the physical manifestation of Love. If you were to live your life in such a way that everything you did was in an effort to evoke that feeling, is there any way your life could be worse? Does it not stand to reason that whenever that feeling is present, you can do no wrong? How would it be possible to do someone harm when you are experiencing the joy of love?
Have you ever done harm to another person, either physically or emotionally? Take a moment to remember a time when you intentionally did another person harm. Do you remember how it felt? Do you remember that feeling of blackness welling up in the center of your being, almost like a dark and heavy cloud that saturates your being and begins to pull anything good down into its depths, leaving you feeling nothing but pain and anger. I have felt that and I believe that feeling to be the physical manifestation of Hate. Do you remember how much easier it is to hurt another person when under the spell of that emotion, wielding that dark magic? Do you remember how much energy it took to cconvert that feeling back to love? It's not an easy thing to do.
Good and Evil, the age old enemies of every myth, legend, and religion ever created. Call them Zeus and Hades, Odin and Loki, God and Lucifer, Love and Hate, or simply Creation and Destruction; it does not matter what you name them, for they are but symbols of the two forces that do battle within in us on a daily basis. They are represented in our emotions that sing to great heights when we are doing Right and fall to great depths when we are doing Wrong. These emotions are at their most powerful when they are at their peaks and lows, it is here that they are capable of taking hold of us and propelling us to acts of great Good or Evil; again I present you with Jesus the Christ and now Adolf Hitler, two souls on two very different paths, one possessed by Love and Creation and the other by Hate and Destruction. Both of these men had a profound effect on humanity and the course of human history. What was it about these men that they captivated the hearts and minds of so many. Jesus the Christ inspired people to the possibility of a better world and a personal connection to God through the example of his life. He was put to death on a cross by people who feared his message. He is still known nearly 2000 years later and worshipped by roughly a third of the world's population. Adolf Hitler, a failed artist who found success in public speaking, and used his charisma to enthrall a downtrodden nation with dreams of being a master race that would destroy the Jewish nation to the last man and rule the world. When faced with his imminent defeat he chose to commit suicide by taking cyanide and shooting himself in the head. Do you think that Hitler will be known 2000 years from now in the magnitude that Jesus is known today? I think not. Jesus was the day to Hitler's night. They were the polar opposites of each other, as far removed from each other as Creation and Destruction.
My Father loved to make model airplanes. He would sit for hours at a time; painstakingly painting all of the pieces and gluing them together to create these beautiful replicas of airplanes. Then, he would hang the finished planes from my bedroom ceiling. I think I had about 12 different sirplanes hanging from my ceiling by the time I was about 7 years old. I loved those planes. When I would have trouble falling to sleep at night I would take my flashlight and slowly move the beam of light from plane to plane and revel in their beauty and intricacy until my eyelids grew heavy and I would fall asleep. Then one day, possessed by boredom and mischievousness, I thought it would be fun to make believe that I was being attacked by all of those planes and to defend myself against them I gathered a variety of small, hard objects to act as projectile weapons. I stood upon my bed and defended myself against those planes until every last one lay broken and in pieces upon my bedroom floor. I remember thinking and feeling that this was wrong but I was having so much fun watching the planes twist on their strings as they were bombarded by my projectiles and ultimately thrilling in the moments when the planes would loosen from the ceiling and fall crashing to the floor. Besides, I figured that since my Father had created these planes it would be an easy thing for him to fix them, ah the ignorance of childhood. So it was that what took my Father, off and on, 7 years to create, I managed to destroy in under 20 minutes. I'll never forget my Father's face when he entered my room and was confronted by the ruin that littered my battlefield. He said something to me that I no longer remember, but the pain and hurt that lived on his face and in his voice at that moment is forever burned into my mind. He never made another model airplane after that day and died 3 years later. I deeply regret the hurt I caused him that day and I would say to him through the void, "I am sorry for destroying your planes, but am deeply sorry for hurting you. Please forgive me."
It is a law of the Universe that it is far easier to destroy than to create. In this same vein it is far easier to hate than to love. There is little resistance to hate because the process of hate involves closing yourself off and pushing away. Your internal self becomes falsely safer when hating. Love, on the other hand, requires you to open your internal self up to another person, which leaves you open and vulnerable to being hurt, thus love takes far more effort and risk than hate. I would add to this a question, "If faced with the decision of being punched and kicked a number of times or having your heart broken, which would you choose?" My thoughts are that anyone who has had their heart broken before would choose the beating over the broken heart. Why? Because even a severe beating, minus broken bones, will most likely heal within a month while a broken heart, depending on its severity, may never heal. Emotional pain is and has always been far more damaging than physical pain.
Again, I take you back to Hitler, he wasn't born evil, yet by the time of his death he had become one of the most evil men in history. What happened to him that took him from an artist to the orchestrator of genocide? I would theorize that it is most likely that he was beaten down emotionally both personally by his peers and by the state that Germany was in following Word War I. Then when he was introduced to a radical political movement, in which he found his personal power, he used that to inflict his emotional pain on the rest of the world. Now, what would have happened had he found the strength and courage to work through his pain and learned to love? What if he had used his charisma and penchant for public speaking to uplift the German people and urge them toward positive change? Why did he choose one path over the other? I believe that he chose the path of Destruction because it was easy and open to him, it allowed him to blame others for his own pain and exact revenge upon them, whereas the path of Creation was frought with personal pain and struggle and he could not find the inner strength and courage to walk it.
I would walk the path of Love and Creation, for the path of Hate and Destruction is one that is incomprehensible to me. Given that I have choice of remaining stagnant or working towards something better. I find it a very scary prospect to open myself for the world to see and judge. However, I am beginning to not only learn, but understand, that those judgements are nothing but reflections of the people that make them and have nothing to do with me. It is a difficult lesson, but I am progressing and the further I progress the closer I come to the eradication of my fear and, ultimately, to the real me. It is toward that goal that I began this blog. May I find the courage to maintain the path and adhere to my journey.
Have you ever felt that thing in the center of your chest when you connect with another person? Remember the first time you fell in love? Take a moment to remember it. Do you remember how it felt? Do you remember that feeling that welled up in the center of your being and you felt so much joy that you thought your heart would burst? I've felt that and I believe that feeling to be the physical manifestation of Love. If you were to live your life in such a way that everything you did was in an effort to evoke that feeling, is there any way your life could be worse? Does it not stand to reason that whenever that feeling is present, you can do no wrong? How would it be possible to do someone harm when you are experiencing the joy of love?
Have you ever done harm to another person, either physically or emotionally? Take a moment to remember a time when you intentionally did another person harm. Do you remember how it felt? Do you remember that feeling of blackness welling up in the center of your being, almost like a dark and heavy cloud that saturates your being and begins to pull anything good down into its depths, leaving you feeling nothing but pain and anger. I have felt that and I believe that feeling to be the physical manifestation of Hate. Do you remember how much easier it is to hurt another person when under the spell of that emotion, wielding that dark magic? Do you remember how much energy it took to cconvert that feeling back to love? It's not an easy thing to do.
Good and Evil, the age old enemies of every myth, legend, and religion ever created. Call them Zeus and Hades, Odin and Loki, God and Lucifer, Love and Hate, or simply Creation and Destruction; it does not matter what you name them, for they are but symbols of the two forces that do battle within in us on a daily basis. They are represented in our emotions that sing to great heights when we are doing Right and fall to great depths when we are doing Wrong. These emotions are at their most powerful when they are at their peaks and lows, it is here that they are capable of taking hold of us and propelling us to acts of great Good or Evil; again I present you with Jesus the Christ and now Adolf Hitler, two souls on two very different paths, one possessed by Love and Creation and the other by Hate and Destruction. Both of these men had a profound effect on humanity and the course of human history. What was it about these men that they captivated the hearts and minds of so many. Jesus the Christ inspired people to the possibility of a better world and a personal connection to God through the example of his life. He was put to death on a cross by people who feared his message. He is still known nearly 2000 years later and worshipped by roughly a third of the world's population. Adolf Hitler, a failed artist who found success in public speaking, and used his charisma to enthrall a downtrodden nation with dreams of being a master race that would destroy the Jewish nation to the last man and rule the world. When faced with his imminent defeat he chose to commit suicide by taking cyanide and shooting himself in the head. Do you think that Hitler will be known 2000 years from now in the magnitude that Jesus is known today? I think not. Jesus was the day to Hitler's night. They were the polar opposites of each other, as far removed from each other as Creation and Destruction.
My Father loved to make model airplanes. He would sit for hours at a time; painstakingly painting all of the pieces and gluing them together to create these beautiful replicas of airplanes. Then, he would hang the finished planes from my bedroom ceiling. I think I had about 12 different sirplanes hanging from my ceiling by the time I was about 7 years old. I loved those planes. When I would have trouble falling to sleep at night I would take my flashlight and slowly move the beam of light from plane to plane and revel in their beauty and intricacy until my eyelids grew heavy and I would fall asleep. Then one day, possessed by boredom and mischievousness, I thought it would be fun to make believe that I was being attacked by all of those planes and to defend myself against them I gathered a variety of small, hard objects to act as projectile weapons. I stood upon my bed and defended myself against those planes until every last one lay broken and in pieces upon my bedroom floor. I remember thinking and feeling that this was wrong but I was having so much fun watching the planes twist on their strings as they were bombarded by my projectiles and ultimately thrilling in the moments when the planes would loosen from the ceiling and fall crashing to the floor. Besides, I figured that since my Father had created these planes it would be an easy thing for him to fix them, ah the ignorance of childhood. So it was that what took my Father, off and on, 7 years to create, I managed to destroy in under 20 minutes. I'll never forget my Father's face when he entered my room and was confronted by the ruin that littered my battlefield. He said something to me that I no longer remember, but the pain and hurt that lived on his face and in his voice at that moment is forever burned into my mind. He never made another model airplane after that day and died 3 years later. I deeply regret the hurt I caused him that day and I would say to him through the void, "I am sorry for destroying your planes, but am deeply sorry for hurting you. Please forgive me."
It is a law of the Universe that it is far easier to destroy than to create. In this same vein it is far easier to hate than to love. There is little resistance to hate because the process of hate involves closing yourself off and pushing away. Your internal self becomes falsely safer when hating. Love, on the other hand, requires you to open your internal self up to another person, which leaves you open and vulnerable to being hurt, thus love takes far more effort and risk than hate. I would add to this a question, "If faced with the decision of being punched and kicked a number of times or having your heart broken, which would you choose?" My thoughts are that anyone who has had their heart broken before would choose the beating over the broken heart. Why? Because even a severe beating, minus broken bones, will most likely heal within a month while a broken heart, depending on its severity, may never heal. Emotional pain is and has always been far more damaging than physical pain.
Again, I take you back to Hitler, he wasn't born evil, yet by the time of his death he had become one of the most evil men in history. What happened to him that took him from an artist to the orchestrator of genocide? I would theorize that it is most likely that he was beaten down emotionally both personally by his peers and by the state that Germany was in following Word War I. Then when he was introduced to a radical political movement, in which he found his personal power, he used that to inflict his emotional pain on the rest of the world. Now, what would have happened had he found the strength and courage to work through his pain and learned to love? What if he had used his charisma and penchant for public speaking to uplift the German people and urge them toward positive change? Why did he choose one path over the other? I believe that he chose the path of Destruction because it was easy and open to him, it allowed him to blame others for his own pain and exact revenge upon them, whereas the path of Creation was frought with personal pain and struggle and he could not find the inner strength and courage to walk it.
I would walk the path of Love and Creation, for the path of Hate and Destruction is one that is incomprehensible to me. Given that I have choice of remaining stagnant or working towards something better. I find it a very scary prospect to open myself for the world to see and judge. However, I am beginning to not only learn, but understand, that those judgements are nothing but reflections of the people that make them and have nothing to do with me. It is a difficult lesson, but I am progressing and the further I progress the closer I come to the eradication of my fear and, ultimately, to the real me. It is toward that goal that I began this blog. May I find the courage to maintain the path and adhere to my journey.
posted by phoenixfirerising19 | 10:37 PM
1 Comments:
I totally agree. It is far easier to push away from someone, than to allow yourself to be open with them. Once you push someone away, and you realize what you've done, it's still even more difficult to come back and say you're sorry. So your pain continues. When you have emotional pain from your childhood, you are essentially walking around like a big gaping wound. When someone touches you, you hurt. That's why some people cannot except love. Because they were abused as children by their parents, who would upon beating or verbally abusing their child tell them they loved them. So now everytime those people hear the words I love you, they associate love with pain because they haven't healed the wound from their parents. It starts with forgiving your parents. That's the only way to heal the wound. And the only way more people will be accepting of love in their lives.
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