2012 MY DIARY - JAN 8 - love hurts

Sunday January 8th 2012

Love hurts. Those of you who haven’t experienced that haven’t truly lived… or truly loved. Only if you know the feeling of having your heart shattered into a million pieces, of not being able to breathe because of the pain inside, do you really know what it means to suffer because of love. Heart-break is called such because of the sensation of an actual breaking pain inside when your love is in some way destroyed, rejected or taken away from you. Crack! Snap! Bang! That is how real and intense it can feel.
Only when you actually lose something you had, can you appreciate it; the same applies with love. Only the loss of love or the person you loved really gives you a sense of its value – because of its absence. With each painful experience, we become deeper people, more able to experience the highs of life. Only when we feel completely empty inside (sometimes because our love has been stolen or has run dry) are we able to fill ourselves up (again) with love. A paradigm would be the clay pot being burned in the potter’s oven; only after it has been scalded with heat can the vessel be ready to be filled with food. A wooden goblet must be carved hollow in order for it to be able to contain wine. The pot and goblet are vessels, like our souls and our hearts, and the food and wine represent love. In other words, it may take some burning and emptiness in order to produce something ready, with the right texture and depth in which to carry nourishing, intoxicating, pleasurable and satisfying love.
Love is without doubt, one of the – if not the most – powerful thing in the world, and this is obvious simply from the fact that countless living creatures have done amazing and crazy things for it and because of it. Love drives all sorts of animals and people to do and feel all sorts of things, often without logical explanation. There is nothing to match this thing called love or completely explain it. For everyone, love is different – it could be described in similar ways by many, but no-one really know how each of us feels within when we identify it, and that is why love is relative and personal. Alternatively, one can look at love at a more universal level. Love is a ubiquitous force that exists independent of the people experiencing it. That idea of omnipresent love can be much more powerful. Either way you look at it, love has immense strength and energy, which is why it can be amazingly good. However when you have tasted its sweet, delicious fruit… and then the tree is chopped down, it can feel incredibly bad. You hurt because you no longer have any fruit to nourish yourself with, because you don’t even know if another tree bearing that fruit exists in any other orchard on earth, and because you don’t know if you will like or be able to eat any of the other fruit on any of the other trees around. You feel like you will starve and die without it.
Love indeed hurts. That is perhaps why they say that people “fall in love”, because when you fall you often hurt yourself. But people keep doing it, so we know it’s got to be worth it. It has never, ever gone out of fashion. We are made to love and be loved – it’s in our nature as humans. Denying ourselves of that would be like denying the day of sun, or the ocean of water. We cannot fully experience the height of our existence if we spend a lifetime without love at all, and that is why we go to all lengths to find the real thing, and then keep hold of it when we find it. Which is why, if we have to give it up or lose it or realize we have never even had it in the first place, the pain seems unbearable, catastrophic even.
What we must remember when it comes down to it, is that love is accessible to all – there is a form of love both out there and within us which is easily tapped into if you just believe in it and allow yourself to feel it – and it is free. Imagine that: what is perhaps the most powerful thing ever to exist is free for all! The only cost you may have to pay is the pain and hurt you will most probably feel when some other factor affects your love in a detrimental way. Nevertheless, if you can truly love yourself, no-one can ever take that away from you. So it is worth it, at the end of the day, because, unlike everything else in life - including life itself – some kinds of love can last forever.