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Commentary Too - Dec 22, 2005 - Printable Version
- One Love
by Mark Faulk
I found this article while stumbling around lost in my computer a little bit ago. It seems I wrote it a few weeks back, and then got distracted by the....ooooh, look at the pretty butterfly! Um....where was I? (man, that joke never fails to crack me up). Okay, I found this article, and since it's almost Chris...I mean, since it's almost that non-specific Winter Holiday, I decided to dust it off and post it on the Faulking Truth. I have to forewarn you, it's a bit wordy. So what else is new?
One Love
So, what do you really want out of life? A high paying, fulfilling job? Security? A nice home, or car, or any of the multitude of material trappings that represent "success" in today's society? Maybe traveling makes you happy, seeing the beauty of the world, or reveling in the luxuries of vacation resorts and recreational activities.
Sorry, but when it comes to true happiness, material things aren't going to cut it. Sure, they'll bring you comfort, and maybe even a kind of contentment that will make your life tolerable, and give you a surface sense of well being. But as for living a truly fulfilled life, as for feeling the deepest sense of aliveness that one can possibly feel? Forget it, if material wealth is all you're after, you're just existing, you're simply (as I've put it before on these pages) "taking up space in an already crowded world." Not only that, but you're cluttering it up with all of your crap.
This is my commandment, that ye love one another.
~ Jesus, In John 15:12
How about that inner feeling of well-being that comes from spiritual awakening? Some of the greatest people in history seem to have managed to eschew the need for physical comfort, and even for human contact, in exchange for so-called true enlightenment, a deeper sense of universal awareness that places us above the material world, beyond the confines of mankind, and presumably, beyond the need for love. Or did they? Even our deepest thinkers, those who sacrificed their own need for true love....for one love that outshines all others, recognized the universal human need for love. From Ghandi to Jesus, from Socrates to Shakespeare, from Moses to Mother Teresa, they all spoke of it's importance, of the inner fulfillment that can be experienced through love, and only love.
I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
~ Mother Teresa
Well then, how about the sense of elation and acceptance that accompanies attracting attention from those around you? I mean, who doesn't want people to like them....to adore them, to acknowledge their existence, to validate their sense of self worth, to put it bluntly, to feed their egos. And if one person can make you feel wanted and loved, just imagine how fulfilled you'd feel if you had dozens, or even hundreds, of people telling you how brilliant, talented, and important you are. Shouldn't that be enough to fill that tiny little void that lurks deep inside of you? Sorry, folks. While it's true that we think we need all of those things, it's also true that all the adulation in the world won't even begin to replace the feeling that we get from a single touch or look from the one who truly loves us...who completes us.
It's no accident that the art, the music, the books, and the movies that move us the most, that literally break our hearts, that trigger in us a longing for something more....something deeper, something that reaches deep down into that hidden part of our our heart and soul, are stories of one-on-one love, true love, the proverbial love for the ages. And I'm not talking about the feel good andtheyalllivedhappilyeverafter stories that are churned out in formulaic fashion like so many widgets on an assembly line. No, the stories I'm talking about are the elusive tales of tragic love, of finding one's soulmate....and then losing him or her, for whatever reason. Blame it on the universe. Blame it on society, circumstance, a simple twist of fate. Blame it on the stars. These are the stories that find their way to "that place," that single point that resides so deeply inside of us that we often aren't even aware of its existence until someone, or something reaches past the surface, past the trappings of the physical world, past the traumas and all the baggage of our inner psyches, past our personal goals and aspirations, and simply touches us in a way that we've never been touched before, and awakens in us an undefinable emotion or feeling that goes deeper than anything we've ever felt before. And, just like that, everything else that we ever thought we wanted, everything that we believed would bring us contentment, every emotion that we've felt up to that moment, becomes obsolete, petty, and shallow.
That feeling.....that moment when "everything changes" inside of us, when anything less is suddenly never again enough, when we are at long last able to exclaim to ourselves "That's it! That's what I was searching for all these years, that's my personal nirvana, that's what life is all about." It's the most elusive feeling in this vast universe, because it has nothing to do with anything outside of us, nothing to do with material wealth, nothing to with reality in the worldly sense of the word. It's personal, it's buried so deep inside of us that all the words in the greatest languages that ever existed are inadequate to describe it, and certainly not in the confines of the tepid english language. Why do you think that so much time, so many words, and so much emotion has been exhausted by the greatest creative and scientific minds in history, all striving to define a single word....love? Because so far, no one has been able to express it adequately using symbols, words, or even visual images. And why is that? Because it can't be done. Love just is.
Love and electricity are one in the same, my dear. If you do not feel the jolt in your soul every time a kiss is shared, a whisper is spoken, a touch is felt, then you're not really in love at all.
~C.J. Franks
So how do you know if what you're feeling IS true love, and not just passion or physical attraction, or some kind of filling of ones emotional or material needs? That's the most elusive, the most complicated, and yet the simplest of all human dilemmas. You can try to define it by analyzing the emotions that accompany it, you can attempt to create a list of guidelines and criterea that help you to recognize it, but in the end, none of that matters. There are no compatibility tests that will guarantee true love, no online dating services that can lead it to you, no sure way to tell when, or even if, true love will find you. It will most likely happen when you're looking the other way, when your thoughts are elsewhere, when you least expect it.
Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and as difficult as that.
~ Michael Leunig
How do you know when you've found true love? You just do. It's that simple, and that complex. You might spend the rest of your life trying to deny it, explain it, put a label on it, or tell yourself that it will come around again, but in the end, it always comes back to that single moment that you looked into his or her eyes, and went "oh my god, this is it." You just know. Even if you choose to ignore your heart, and never follow through on what's inside of you, that feeling will never leave you. Hide it, bury it, try to kill it, or as I said, simply try to ignore it or deny it's existence, it doesn't matter.....YOU JUST KNOW.
Love from one side hurts, but love from two sides heals.
~ William Shakespeare
And what if you decide to acknowledge true love, to accept it in all of it's glory, it's danger, it's dizzying consequences....but the one that you love doesn't? What if your love goes unrequited? First of all, I don't believe that true love can be one sided, I truly believe that it is like electricity, that you can only feel true love for someone when you feel it from someone. By definition, true love is two sided. That indescribable feeling that so many people have spent their entire lives trying to describe, that people have lived their entire lives in both elation and sorrow over, that people have even died for, isn't a feeling that comes from you, nor can it a be a feeling that is directed at you.....it's a feeling that flows between you, continually and for perpetuity. It's a circle, a river, a fountain that never stops flowing.
Love is danger when we're looking for safety. Love arrives when we're not looking for it, and refuses to leave when we ask it to. The more we try to ignore it, the more it haunts us. If you try to push love away, it just finds a place to hide even deeper in your heart.
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.
~ Anais Nin
You can't deny love, you can only taint it through your actions. And therein lies the true foible of human nature. We find true love, and many times, through fear, through insecurity, through a misguided vision of what we believe that life is and should be, of the expectations of society or those around us, of our own preconceived expectations, we push it away instead of just embracing it, we lock it away deep inside of us instead of just letting it flow back and forth between us. Deny love for long enough, and you can destroy any chance of consummating that love, but despite your best (or worst) efforts, you can't kill it. On the surface, you can disguise it as resentment, as friendship, as jealously, even as hatred, as a hundred different emotions, you can taint it with your insecurities, you can traumatize it, you can sabatoge it, you can even convince your conscience that it was never love to begin with, but somewhere deep inside of you, it will still exist.
Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.
~ Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
Sadly, that is the true test of love.....time. And for so many of us, by the time we finally give in and accept that THAT WAS IT....that he or she was THE ONE....it's too late. Again, for whatever reason, we so often deny love, and for so long, that while it doesn't die, it does, or more accurately, we do, just give up on making it happen in the real world, on turning that inner rush, that sense of elation, that crazy impossible combination of heart beating too fast, head spinning, and all logic fleeing our minds and bodies, into something concrete and solid in this world....something we can come home to, something we can touch and hold. Instead, we end up burying it so deep that we can (for the most part) ignore its existence, at least in our conscious mind.
Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
~ Kahlil Gibran
The reasons for denying true love, for walking away from what is....and should be....the most incredible feeling that a human could ever experience, are as varied and complex as love itself. What makes one person run blindly towards love, while the next one shields their eyes....and their hearts....from it will all their might? Sometimes it's circumstances....is true love more important than other types of love, our country, our personal goals and accomplishments, or "the greater good"? It's hard to say, and even harder to be the one who has to make that decision for themselves. Or sometimes, it's just something inside of us that causes us to sabatoge or give up love: we're not ready for it, emotionally or otherwise, we're afraid of it, we're rendered helpless by indecision, uncertainty, or circumstances. Giving in to true love requires an incredile leap of faith and almost always emcompasses sacrifices, and a giving, of oneself to the other, and many of us just aren't equipped for the changes, both good and bad, that that can bring.
I've known people who spent their entire lives with someone, content in their relationship, and then, unwittingly, walked into a room, looked another person in the eye, and went "oh hell, that wasn't true love...this is!" and conversely, I've known people who knew that they had found true love, and for one reason or another, decided that the sacrifices that they had to make to bring that love to fruition just weren't worth it.
What if following our heart on its headlong flight into uncharted territory brings pain to others who we care about and yes...love? How do you compare the rush of "new love" with the depth of love that comes only with the passage of time? What if we take that leap of faith, hurt those around us.....and we're wrong about it? What if it doesn't work out, and all we've done is cause pain to those we truly loved? While finding true love isn't a matter of choice, once we find it, what we do with that knowledge, how we deal with that revelation, is a matter of personal choice, and to some degree at least, free will.
And so we go on with our lives: one person denying it, the next embracing it.....and both feeling the pain of not having it. I believe that that is the single most overriding sadness that permeates mankind, true love either not found, or worse still, true love denied. When you look into someone's eyes and see a kind of emptiness, a sense of unfulfillment, that is what you're seeing. Another soul looking for true love, and hoping that maybe, just maybe, you're the person who will connect with them in that special way that will only happen once in a lifetime.
Real love stories never have endings.
~ Richard Bach
But once you've experienced "true love"? You'll never be the same again. Oh, you might learn to accept your decision, you might live an otherwise fulfilling and important life, you might even find others who fill your other needs. But I repeat: you'll never be the same again.
'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson
And the lonliness, the emptiness that so many of us feel...that sense of "something missing deep inside of ones heart"? If you think that feeling that there's something lacking in your life is an uneasy, unsettling, and often times melancholey feeling, just imagine how it feels to know that you found the thing that you lacked.....and denied it. It is truly better to have loved and lost. Just ask anyone who has loved....win or lose....or better yet, ask someone who found true love and then denied it. They'll all tell you the same thing....follow your heart. In the end, it's not what we think or do in life, it's what we feel.
While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many—the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically wooly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it.
~David Buss, University of Texas; Author, The Evolution of Desire
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