I’ve never been the best with goodbyes; I don’t think many of us are.
It might be why I’ve come to dislike airports as much as I do. If you’re in an airport, you’re saying goodbye to someone, or something, in some way or another.
Part of me wonders why we put ourselves through these types of feelings.
And here I am, in another airport. I’m looking around and watching the goodbyes everywhere. Sisters holding each other tightly in an embrace. A father holds his little boy who is crying because he’s leaving. Lovers hold hands until that final, desperate moment.
The older I get, the more I realize that every goodbye could be the last we have with that person.
And yet I realized today that it’s for that reason exactly that goodbyes are a beautiful thing.
In a little over an hour waiting to board my plane, a million memories of the person I had just said goodbye to flooded my mind.
I felt a strong appreciation for all of the times I was lucky enough to spend with her. I laughed aloud at the many good memories, and replayed with understanding and compassion the uncomfortable ones. I found myself momentarily regretting all of the times I wasn’t completely present in the moment with her.
The experiences with our loved ones are special because we have to, at some time or another, say goodbye to them. With this in mind, each moment becomes a singular treasure to be cherished and appreciated.
I used to want to live forever. I wanted my friends and family to live forever. I wanted to stay close to home. I didn’t want to say goodbye.
But what would relationships be worth if we were not doomed to one day say goodbye?
So spend time with those you love. Connect with them on the deepest levels. Laugh off the perceived issues and embrace the great times.
Stay completely present, because one day you’ll say goodbye.
Horrific events such as those which took place in Sydney a year ago, and those seen in Canadian parliament a few months before it, make it easy to lose (at least a little) faith in humanity.
They make it is easy to generalize.
It becomes easy to blame and to point the finger.
It becomes easy to hate.
Yet as easy as it is to become less humane, it is not the reaction I witnessed in the aftermath of the Sydney siege.
I saw Australia come together as a people, no longer bound by any political, ethnic, or cultural differences.
I saw the brave men and women of Australian law enforcement sail into a storm of bullets attempting to save people they had never met.
I saw people of all religions rally around the hash tag #IllRideWithYou, supporting those beginning to feel ostracized by their faith – which extremists’ constant misrepresentation has sullied with a crimson stain – to continue to freely and without fear commit themselves to their God and their religious beliefs.
I saw candles lit for the safe keeping of those taken hostage, brothers and sisters we knew could be our own.
I saw a country – and a global community – in mourning for a son and daughter taken too soon. We willingly made their families’ pain our own.
I saw, if even for a moment, how beautiful humanity can be at its best.
For at least a day, I saw us no longer blinded by a veil of ignorance. We were – all around the world – simply human.
That universal empathy for the human struggle was alive in all of us. We had no idea of the races, religions, or cultural dispositions of those taken hostage. Yet we feared, hoped, and prayed for them in earnest and with a single voice.
Most importantly, that love exclusive to humans – the one which transcends space and time, life and death – beat louder than ever in how we responded. We were a singular beat in a united human heart.
It is always difficult to look past the hate, to see light in the darkness. Sydney was no different. Why is this so?
Because love isn’t as jarring as a black flag pinned against a shop window, held up by victims terrified for their lives. It isn’t as easy to sensationalize as a man driven by darkness, willing to cause pain and suffering to pursue his own deranged motives. It isn’t as loud as early morning gunshots shattering the innocence of a peaceful nation.
The jarring image that many of us remember. [Source: http://www.bbc.com ]
But isn’t that what makes love such a special thing? It isn’t easy to find. Its rarity is what makes love precious.
We see glimmers of it in the passing smiles of strangers and in the laughter of children before it drifts away on the changing winds of the seasons.
We too often let hatred and prejudice bury love next to our slowly eroding humanity. But we didn’t on that Monday a year ago.
Instead, we came together.
What happened in Sydney was not a demonstration of the deterioration of humanity through hatred and social division.
It depicted a single lost soul who had allowed himself to be corrupted by the evils of fanaticism.
My heart aches for all of those who are mourning the loss of those we lost on this day a year ago. Yet it hurts more to think that the memory of them will be tainted by associations with the evil which manifested itself in the form of a broken man.
Instead let us remember the lessons of love that came from their deaths.
Let us remember the brave men and women who risked their lives trying to save them.
The thousands upon thousands of complete strangers who turned an entire Sydney square into a garden of Eden by filling it with beautiful flowers, paying their respects to people they had never known.
Australia turned a site of horror into a garden of beauty and love. [Source: 702 ABC Sydney: John Donegan ]
The coming together of all races and religions in astounding candlelight vigils full of love and empathy.
The memory of those lost must be remembered for what that event showed us.
It demonstrated how truly powerful love can be when we fight all the prejudices suffocating it. That is how we can honour their memory. That is how we must make sense of such mindless and depraved acts of violence.
I’m not sure when we’ll meet. I’m not sure what you’ll look like. I’m not sure what your name will be.
I am almost certain, however, that it will be difficult to find a wife that will let me name you Germanicus, Octavia, Aurelius, Augusta, or any other name of my choosing.
I’m unsure if you’ll take an interest to sport, art, or literature. I’m unsure about your sexual orientation or you skin colour. None of these things are, or will be, a concern to me.
I couldn’t possibly love you any more or any less than I already do. Existence and creation are love, after all, and you will spring from that very same eternal source of life – but I digress.
Germanicus Giorgi? [Source: Wikipedia]
You’ll quickly learn that we humans have a cruel obsession with guarantees. We dislike when the world around us isn’t concrete and stable. We constantly fight against the perpetual uncertainty that is life. Guarantees create an illusion of safety for us, and we are content to live our lives in that illusion.
Though I don’t remember mine personally, I’m sure your birth will be a difficult time for you. You are uncertain what to expect, you are completely dependant on others, and you are unable to defend yourself. It is for this reason that I search for guarantees to give you to put your thoughts to rest; to create an illusion of safety for you.
Unfortunately, I’ve noticed there isn’t many I can give you.
I can’t promise you protection. Danger comes hand in hand with stepping outside of your comfort zone and truly experiencing life. I don’t want you to play it safe. I want you to climb mountains and travel the world. To protect you would be to keep you close. To protect you would be to smother you. I want you to come, to see, and to conquer.
I can’t promise you happiness. I can give you comfort. I can give you warmth, bread, and a roof over your head. I can give you private schools or new hockey gear, but nothing I can give you will ever make you happy. You are, and always will be, responsible for your own happiness. I will help you down that path as much as I can, but happiness is your choice.
I can’t promise you I’ll know the answers. I’m a human, just like you. We are fallible; we make mistakes. I want you to never be afraid to fail. It’s okay to make a mistake. Too often do parents play the charade of perfection in front of their children, and reprimand them for not being perfect themselves. I’ll be as new to being a parent as you will be to being a child. We’ll both mess up along the way, but we’re in this together.
I can’t promise you I’ll always be there. I want you to embrace your independence and to realize how efficient you truly are. I’m going to let you figure some things out on your own. I’ll probably find it difficult and will intervene more than I should, but that’s part of my learning experience.
Big picture, we’re all mortal. One day I’ll pass on from this silly dream. When that happens, the more I’ve let you trip and fall along the way the more you’ll be ready to face this world alone. I need you know to how strong and capable you are.
I can’t promise you’ll be popular. Kids can be mean. They grow up in a society that makes them feel extremely uneasy in their own skin. Many of them will project those insecurities onto you. It will hurt.
I’ll take the time to show your true worth. You’ll learn, as a child of the stars, how perfect you are. I can’t promise you’ll be popular, but you’ll be in a place to take pity on insecure bullies rather than being hurt by them.
“We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt, Great Speeches.
In the end, the only thing I can really promise you is that I won’t promise you anything – except for my eternal and undying love.
I didn’t plan on writing about the horror that struck Beirut and Paris, just a day apart, over a week ago. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why.
I guess a part of me didn’t think it was a time for heavy-handed words. Humanity was once again bleeding from wounds caused by senseless violence against itself. Infected and swollen from thousands of years of agitation, we had once again ripped off the scab.
I wanted to people sit in that wound. I wanted us to feel the pain and the sadness that my brothers and sisters across the world were drowning in.
A part of me wanted a moment to breathe. We humans, when overwhelmed with powerful emotions, are vulnerable to overreacting. I didn’t want to be swept away by the tsunami of aggression, hatred, bigotry, Islamophobia, and calls for vengeance that flooded my news-feed.
Another part of me felt a bit hypocritical writing about Beirut and France while I, like most of us, had largely ignored the other 287 terrorist attacks that have taken place thus far in 2015.
Even the tragedy in Beirut was barely whispered about, until the Lebanese community finally came together and made themselves heard.
Female relatives of Samer Huhu, who was killed in the Islamic State twin bombing attack, mourn during his funeral in a southern suburb of Beirut on November 13, 2015. [Photo Credit: Getty Images]
There was also the part of me who witnessed so many of you fighting the good fight; rational minds not being overwhelmed by fear; pure hearts preaching love instead of hate; devote warriors of peace refusing to be goaded into a trap and ambushed by the desperate plotting of Ares.
In short, I felt that you didn’t need my words to echo your own, and I still don’t believe you do.
But I recently come across a story that Livy included in his “History of Rome” that really struck home with me. Although it seemingly has nothing to do with Beirut and Paris, I think under the surface the two events are directly related.
Gaius Mucius Scaevola was a Roman warrior who was captured during a war with the Etruscans. Mucius was brought before the Etruscan king who showed him a raging fire. Mucius was told that unless he betrayed his fellow Romans, he would be thrown into the flames.
The king was using the heat of the fire to strike fear into Mucius, and attempting to use that fear to break him.
Mucius announced that he was a citizen of Rome, and that he would rather die than be a slave to fear. Livy explains that after his declaration, Mucius
thrust his hand into the fire that was kindled for the sacrifice. When he allowed his hand to burn as if his spirit were unconscious of sensation, the king was almost beside himself with wonder.” – Livy, History of Rome.
Staring into the eyes of the king, Mucius demonstrated that he would always have the power of choice. Outnumbered and helpless, he choose to put his own flesh to the flame rather give into the fear the king was trying to use to control him.
He did not scream. He did not flinch. The pain was welcomed. It was a demonstration that Mucius, though in a dire situation, never gave away his personal power and freedom.
The king feared Mucius’ bravery might be a representation of the Roman people as a whole. He released the man and immediately sought a peace with Rome.
He knew that if the spirit of a people cannot be broken, then the people themselves cannot be broken.
Mucius Scaevola (c.1680-4) by Sebastiano Ricci; Although in this rendition the artist’s flames are not quite big enough to be “flung into” – the fate Livy suggests was awaiting Mucius – the act of defiance is equally as powerful.
We, as a collective people, are in the same situation that Gaius Mucius Scaevola found himself in.
Paris and Beirut were our captures. ISIS, sensationalized media, and governments with very specific agendas play the role of the Etruscan king. Muslims and refugees are our fellow Romans; our brothers and our sisters.
Here we stand in front of the king’s black flames of hatred of ignorance. Forces of evil watch eagerly to see if the heat of those dark embers will scare us. They watch to see if their tactics of fear will make us turn our backs on our family in the middle east. They need, and want, us to betray our fellow humans.
For their power comes only from our weakness; they cannot break us from the outside, so they pray that we will cave in.
The power of choice is ours. I look around me and I see the strength in all of you.
Stand before that fire of darkness. Look defiantly into the eyes of the love’s enemies and keep your steady hand in the flames of their hatred.
Choose to be a champion of love and acceptance, rather than a slave to hatred and fear.
If one man changed the mind of a king and altered the history of Rome, imagine what humanity can do if we stand together, as one, against prejudice, fear, and hatred.
Don’t we think it’s a little strange that, in a world of nearly seven and a half billion (7 383 900 000) people, so many of us feel like we’re all alone?
I’ve always found the term “social media” to be a curious one.
Admittedly, if you break the word down into its respective body parts – “social” and “media” – it’s a word that makes perfect sense. Yet it’s not its pieces that make it a puzzle.
The term feels like a misnomer. It doesn’t feel right. I look at social media and I fail to see anything social about it.
Media is not an inherently social entity. From newspapers to Fox News, there is no social interaction actually involved.
We may feel as though we’re socially interacting. Like we’re connecting with that horoscope columnist who just really seems to “get” us, or the newscaster covering our sports team who seems to always agree with our opinion of the new head coach.
Ron Burgundy: One of the Only News Anchors to Truly Understand Us, San Francisco.
[Image Credit: Anchorman]
But we’re not.
We’re still sitting alone at the kitchen table, keeping our eyes on the newspaper while we hurriedly force down the coffee we burnt before work.
We’re still messily finishing that crossword on the train with the stranger in a brown suit next to us as our only companion. And no, it doesn’t count as social interaction because we asked him for a four-lettered word for a famous son of Chronos.
The media doesn’t want to interact with us. It wants us to read, to listen, and to watch their version of what’s happening all around you. It wants to tell us what perception of reality to accept.
Social media, in turn, has taken us one slippery step further down this path of human isolation.
Social media has stolen from us our innate love of society; we have never been more antisocial than we are this very moment.
There was a time, before bullet trains and water spraying jet packs (which are pretty awesome for the record), when our nearest neighbours were fifteen kilometres away and the fastest method of travelling was on horseback. Yet we called on each other weekly, if not daily, to fulfil that natural desire to truly interact with other human beings.
Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” – Aristotle, The Politics.
Fast forward to today, and I haven’t called on my neighbour since before the first Jurassic Park movie came out.
Social media has negatively affected every (formerly) social activity.
I see us capturing moments – beautiful sunrises and breathtaking full moons – through Instagram filters instead of capturing them with our eyes and keeping them in our souls.
We write those moments as Snapchat stories instead of writing them across our hearts, as part of our own stories that are constantly unfolding.
We use the check in button on Facebook to let our friends know where we are and what we’re doing, instead of checking in with a call or catching up with a visit.
We’ve mastered messaging with “abreeves” but forgotten how to carry a face-to-face conversation.
We live tweet sports events from our couch instead of taking a road trip to catch a live sporting event with some friends.
We text acquaintances while we sit around a table with our actual friends.
We don’t notice the love of our life next to us in the cafe because our eyes are down on our phone as we try to find love on Tinder. They walk in and out of our lives while we’re swiping right and left.
We’ve exchanged real friends for followers and lovers for “matches.”
And yet, don’t we think it’s a little strange that, in a world of nearly seven and a half billion (7 383 900 000) people, so many of us feel like we’re alone?
It’s because we are alone. Every social media platform offers an additional layer to a wall we’re building between ourselves and those around us. Another filter. More paint on our masks.
We’re given the means to limit and skew the images of ourselves that we put out there, and everyone else is doing the same. It becomes a terrifying idea to show people who we really are, so we don’t. Everyone tries to be like everyone else.
We’re creating a world where no one will truly know anyone.
I think that’s a tragic thing, because the greatest protectors of the beautiful uniqueness and natural individuality we possess as humans should be all of us, together.
Governments and, further back, religions have always feared and denounced the individual; the threat to the status quo.
And yet, individuals such as Copernicus, da Vinci, Tesla, Picasso, and Einstein did amazing things by questioning that same status quo, by letting their unique thoughts and feelings be their compass.
They didn’t follow tradition, and we celebrated them for it.
Self-Portrait (1512) by Leonardo da Vinci.
I’m afraid we’re starting to lose that. We’re falling into line.
Not because of fear or oppression – those things could never break our powerful spirit – but because of distraction.
The irony of it all is that I’m communicating this via an outlet that was only born in the age of social media, and sharing it on multiple social media platforms.
I think our advances in technology and our ability to connect with one another is astounding.
I’m thankful for Skype, Instagram, and other means of keeping in touch with all of those that I love and miss at home.
I just think it’s important that in our quest to be more connected, we don’t severe our connection to each other; that we don’t become the snake that eats its own tail.
Recognize each other. Appreciate someone when they do something differently, wear something strange, or embrace their authentic self in any way at all.
You’ll find people start encouraging you to do the same.
Everywhere we look, we see each other in pain. Flicking through a newspaper or television channels, we can regularly find a striking example of someone bearing one of the many crosses we are forced to carry in our lifetime.
None of us can escape the suffering that is the human experience. Our lives will be defined by those struggles which we have found the strength to overcome. All of us the phoenix, our individual suffering our ashes.
And yet we insist on turning these struggles into an issue of race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, or culture. We relate to these issues not as humans, but as a colour of skin, a possessor of certain genitalia, a sexual preference, a place in society, or a zealot of a certain God or Goddess.
We continue to break ourselves apart into smaller and smaller pieces until we fit into tiny, exclusive boxes. We are a black, upper-class, Protestant, heterosexual female. We are a white, blue-collared, atheist, homosexual male.
We restrict our empathy when we latch onto these exclusive groups; they become the only ones who can understand the vastness our individual suffering.
Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Eugène Delacroix: We will unite (and separate) under flags; we will unite under the banner of skin colour, religion, sex, and sexuality – but not our suffering.
We live in an age where we are surrounded by comparison and competition and, whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’ve started to live for it. We revel in it. We waste so much time in our self-comparison with others that giant online industries such as Facebook and Instagram were partially founded – and partially depend – upon it. The desire to compare our lives has literally become a multimillion dollar industry. Even our suffering – unique to our own journey – has not escaped our thirst for comparison and competition.
The problem does not lie in our desire for comparison. Our lives are inherently different from one another, and comparing differences in ourselves provides a means of recognizing and accepting one another despite our superficial differences.
There is also nothing inherently evil in a thirst for competition. I think of the teachings of various martial arts which insist on competition being a vital aspect on the path to self-awareness, self-respect, and personal growth.
Comparison and competition become issues when they are applied to our individual suffering. It arises when we invest in the idea that our suffering is somehow greater and more valid than the suffering of others.
This notion segregates us. It divides and ranks us based on an assumption we do not have the power to confirm or deny – unless someone eventually learns how to experience the lives of two different people, with different issues, simultaneously in order to compare them.
Who’s to say those of us who were born without fathers – whether we’ve lost them to death, jail, or another marriage – suffer more acutely than those who grow up with fathers who leave for work before the sun rises and come home after their bedtime, the fathers who are never around? The suffering for each is rooted in the same longing for paternal affection. Both examples are kids who just wish they could throw the ball around with their pops.
Father and Son (2008) by Bahram Gonche pour: To a young boy, is there really a difference between losing a father and constantly being separate from one?
The examples are endless. Who are we to assume those that have lost a spouse to cancer suffer more deeply than those who have lost theirs to infidelity? That the little brother who loses his big brother to drugs suffers more than the little sister who loses her older sister to the popular group in college?
That the pressure to be of a certain sexuality is more excruciating than the pressure to pursue a traditional career? Both are instances of the person being pressured to live unhappily in a lie in order to please others. Both people are too terrified of social or parental judgements to be true to themselves. Both have somehow been convinced that who they are as a person is wrong.
We could spend an unlimited amount of energy arguing for one case or the other, but it is this exact determination to separate and rank our suffering that is driving us apart.
Instead of a division of suffering, I see the gay male – afraid to come out to his orthodox Christian parents – and the daughter of two Harvard law graduates – who wants to be an artist instead of a lawyer – as two people who are fighting the same battle of identity. I see two people struggling, in different ways, with who they are and the expectations about who they “should” be. I see two people who can show compassion and empathy for one another and who can unite in their suffering under a common thread.
The truth is we don’t know if our suffering is any greater or less than any one else, because it is not in our capacity to understand suffering that we do not know intimately ourselves. Our individual experience and perception only leads to assumption.
The truth is, we all have a different observable universe and our individual suffering is unique to our own story. Our suffering is different, yes, but it can never be assumed that we know what those differences feel like. We certainly cannot presume to know how those differences rank, no matter how obvious it seems.
It’s not about the differences themselves. It’s about the acceptance of those differences. It’s about doing our best to understand those differences. It’s about mutual respect. It’s about loving one another.
Every life history is the history of suffering.” – Arthur Schopenhauer,Manuscript Remains – Volume 3.
The one thing we know for sure is that we all are suffering. We suffer through battles with our identity, image, ego, and our place in the world. We all suffer heartbreak. We all struggle with self-love and acceptance. We suffer through unhappiness and the restlessness of our spirits. We’ve lost loved ones and lovers. We’ve felt alone and unworthy.
Why then, must we compare this suffering? Isn’t it enough to know that every person we pass in the street is fighting a battle of their own? Isn’t it enough to know we’re all in this together? Suffering is the one thing that connects us all.
To be human is to suffer. Instead of using our suffering to separate and rank us, let it unite us. There is no “I”, “me”, or “you.”
The moon showed only a silver sliver of its full self.
Laying in bed, I waited patiently for the Cheshire Cat to open his eyes and reveal himself in the night sky. He never did, of course, but still.
There was something about the moon that cloudless night that inspired a deep feeling of romance inside of me.
Romance, I thought with a bit of a laugh. What is Romance?
Well, Google aptly defines romance as:
romance
rə(ʊ)ˈmans,ˈrəʊmans/
noun
1. afeeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.
“I had a thirst for romance”
2. a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.
“the romance of the sea”
When we were growing up, romance was an easy concept to understand. Every recess was made up of a cohort of young Romeos, all chasing the collective Juliet.
It seemed pretty simple to me in those days. The boy bought (or stole from the neighbour’s garden) flowers, and then professed his love from beneath some sort of balcony. If he was a particularly adept romantic, he would do this by means of a sonnet.
The timing was important; it was best to perform the monologue under a full moon, but during a sunset would also suffice. The woman was, for whatever reason, constantly awake, available to listen, and always waiting for young suitors to visit her at strange hours. At the end of the performance, the Juliet decided she was either:
(1) Not into the idea and sent the boy home, or;
(2) Was satisfied with the romantic gesture and let her hair down for the young man to climb up.
Sure, I might have gotten a few different love stories mixed up at that age, but I had the gist of it. In those days, I wasn’t sure what ensued in her bed chambers afterwards, but I knew it represented the climax – pun intended – of the romance.
As I grew older I began to realize that my vision of what was romantic might not exactly capture the essence of romance. For one, my sisters began to give me an inkling that a truck load of chocolate might better serve a romance than any type of flowers – unless they were chocolate covered and edible. For two, I started to wonder what was in that “happily ever after” that always occurred after the curtains were drawn.
Romeo and Juliet (1884) by Frank Dicksee
We didn’t realize it then, but everything we watched or read during our youth emphasized the beginning of a love story as what should be considered romantic.
The romance always lay in the chase; it was the pursuit of love that was romantic. It was always about that opening gambit and a few initial speed bumps before both prince and princess were ready for that royal wedding. Then the credits rolled.
Even now I think of the happy couple, rosy-cheeked in their romantic infancy, reciting the story of how they met for an audience of half-interested single people. It often runs along the same lines. Initially, the female wasn’t interested but the male romantically wooed her into changing her mind. We cover our hearts and say “aw” when we hear of the cheesy and “romantic” gestures that helped to sway the odds in this particular Romero’s favour.
There’s not much to say after the “how we met” stories concludes; they are in the middle of their happily ever after. The movie is usually over by now. Babies start coming, fights start happening, and a divorce will probably be the result. The spark has faded. The spark that, we’ve been taught, represents the romance. Of course if we see romance – and by an extension, love – in this way, we’re doomed to a never-ending cycle of needing the hunt. Like freezing Neanderthals in the winter, our lives will be spent focusing on chasing the spark, never enjoying the fire we’ve already set ablaze. Is that really what romance is?
I look around me and I see that isn’t true. I see romance everywhere I look. It floats on the breeze that swirls around the elderly couple walking hand in hand in the park. At the arrivals gate in the airport, it swims in the teary-eyes of two lovers locked in an embrace. When two people are separated by an ocean, romance twinkles in the stars they look upon while thinking about each other. It’s in coming home to that familiar face after a long day’s work. It’s in missing someone, even if you just dropped them off. It’s in the strange way you can be overwhelmed with frustration but still love that person with all of your heart.
Romance lives in forgiveness, and understanding, after arguments both big and small. It’s in the first handful of dirt a widower throws on his wife’s coffin. It’s found in the breast pocket of a dead soldier, in the recently dried ink of a letter home to his high school sweet heart. When we’re a shoulder to cry on, romance is that little wet patch of tears they leave on our sweater. When we’re the ones crying, romance is the familiar smell of perfume or cologne that we inhale as we bury our face in their clothes.
The sorrow of lovers parted before they met, laments over promises betrayed, long lonely nights spent sleepless until dawn, pining thoughts for some far place, a woman left sighing over past love in her tumbledown abode – it is these, surely, that embody the romance of love.” – Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees.
Not one of us will ever master love, or understand it. That is why everything about love is exciting and mysterious. As such, there is romance in all of it. We just need to move past our Hollywood conception of it and start enjoying the little things. Love isn’t perfect, and neither are we.
Our happiest and most exciting moments with our significant others will lay perilously close to the saddest and most dull ones. It’s all part of it, it’s up to us to appreciate each moment to the very last. There are little Romeos and Juliets in each of us. We are all romantics. We just need to embrace the romance that’s all around us.
From the time we’re children, we’re taught by society that we aren’t good enough. By the time we reach young adulthood, we try to paint over the people we are with the brushes society suggests for us. We ignore who we’re meant to be by wearing the hats of the people we believe we’re supposed to be. We eventually forget who we are.
The modern culture of romance, or “dating culture”, is the result of the complete lack of importance placed on the vast substance inherent in our own humanity. We spend our days painting beautiful masks of ourselves and spend our nights wearing them out to down town masquerades.
Every weekend is our carnival, every club is our Venice. With all of us dressed in the height of fashion and wearing the dreamiest of disguises, we’re content to dance our youthful years away.
We paint our masks with the simple stripes of the surface. We think of ourselves, and others, as white or black, male or female, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim. We continue to identify with our surface and mistake it for who we are, when the two are not exclusively connected.
We’ve traded complexity for simplicity. With all of us exchanging our identity for identical illusions, we have slowly rendered ourselves interchangeable. All of our masks look the same.
We build sand castles in the path of crashing waves. We find beautiful partners and we dance the nights away. Sometimes our dance partners stay the night and maybe even for breakfast. Sometimes, we share a second dance. On extremely rare occasions, we find their outer shells so shiny and sparkly that they capture our attention for an entire handful of dances.
These dances last long enough to facilitate relationship status changes on our Facebook and inspire overwhelmingly cute Instagram photos of our morning snuggle and romantic gestures. We do everything and go everywhere with this person. We’ve found the one we want to save our last dance for. We’re totally and completely in love.
The Lovers I (1928) by Rene Magritte
And then our surfaces begin to erode. They become difficult to maintain. We struggle to keep up the act. Our polished smiles and filtered personalities begin to crack. The weeds from our overgrown interiors begin to force their way through those cracks. We’re confused, and so are they.
We thought we had already shown one another our true selves when we let them see us in sweat pants or without make-up on. They smelled our morning breath. They caught us with food stuck in our teeth. One time, we even farted in front of them.
Our own shallow notions of ourselves had us equating who we are as people with what our natural surfaces used to look like, before we painted them with water colours and doused them in exotic smelling oils.
Are the cracks starting to show in your mask?
But there’s an entire other world inside of us. It’s full of scars, dreams, mistakes, passions, light, and darkness. It’s a place we’ve ignored while we focused on our appearance, on the character we’re acting as. That place of substance deep inside of us – that place which makes us different and beautiful – provides a journey that would never truly end if our loved ones were to explore it.
But that place scares us. It scares us because we’ve never explored it ourselves. It scares us because we have no idea who we are.
It becomes a terrifying prospect to open this place up to the person we think we love. It’s our own little house of horrors. Even if we did muster the courage to ask them to come inside, how can we expect someone to want to see us for who we are when we can’t even stand the thought of it ourselves? The fact that our significant other is also probably feeling the same personal insecurities only exasperates the situation. The situation becomes unstable because both partners have awoken a deep-seeded self-hatred.
We begin to miss someone loving us for the surface appearance that we’ve spent so much time perfecting. We long to feel that superficial attention and shallow admiration again. We return to the masquerades.
We prefer to spend our time there, hiding behind our masks and having them admired by similarly veiled strangers. We begin to look a little too long at new potential dance partners, with shiny new faces that haven’t eroded like those belonging to our significant others.
We’re bored with what we have at home, because surfaces are simple. There is no journey for us to go on.
That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending – performing. You get to love your pretence….the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are.”― Jim Morrison, 1981 Creem Magazine interview with Lizzie James.
Eventually one (or both) of the partners will realize how difficult it will be to excavate our identities with the appropriate teams of spiritual archaeologists. The road toward self-love has become long and treacherous. We decide a quick reset is much easier.
Being with another person is no place to hide from ourselves, after all. It becomes a race to see who can come up with the perfect wording for whatever arbitrary excuse we’ll use to break up. We’ll call it “losing our spark”, “growing apart”, or “not being happy”.
We’ll break up, get a gym membership, and work on painting over the tiny cracks left from the waltz that lasted a tad too long. We’ll return to the carnival and, thus, the cycle is born anew. We’ll swear off the opposite sex, and then love itself – as though they were the core issues rather than our festering self-loathing.
Eventually that human desire to share ourselves with another will overwhelm us again, at which point we’ll put on our glass slippers, head to the ball, and once again spiral out of control toward midnight.
I’m not saying to ignore your surface, or that it’s not important. I believe the maintenance and development of your body is just as important as your mind and your soul. I believe in balance. Try to indulge in an ignored inner passion.
It makes no difference if that includes cooking, playing an instrument you suck at, or listening to old Led Zeppelin records, as long as it fuels your soul. Read a chapter or two of an old, classic novel while you’re on the stationary bike doing fasted cardio instead of reading your texts. Work a little bit every day on that part of you that we can’t see, that part of you we’ll never be capable of fully exploring. Work on remembering who you really are.
Show me your beautiful and meticulous surface, and I’ll admire it. It might even lure me close enough to share a dance. But if that’s all you have to offer, it’s a dead end. It’s boring, and I’m out. Show me that endless inner garden that you’ve grown, maintained, and explored for yourself, and I’m in.
Take me by the hand and let’s explore one other. Like two children on a magical adventure, I don’t care how much time we spend in there. You’ll have my interest and wonderment forever.
As humans, we love order. Our entire society is built upon it. We define, separate, categorize, analyze, dissect, reduce, and group everything and everyone around us. We build borders and set boundaries. It helps us to understand complexities greater than ourselves.
We break up our whole world into tiny pieces and keep them in the little boxes we’ve made for them. We define athletic greatness with numbers, statistics, and box scores. We measure wealth with commas, assets, and the contents of our safety deposit boxes. We peeled off the layers of nature until all that remained were atoms and then we sorted them into a table full of neatly named elements and little numbered boxes.
We like to live inside the box. Even our notion of what makes a human being hasn’t escaped this obsession to break things down. We’ve reduced the idea of ourselves to a simple vessel carrying two hundred and six bones, some vital organs, and a built-in laboratory capable of internally conducting complex chemical reactions.
The soul doesn’t scientifically exist because we can’t measure and categorize it. As humans, we love to restrict.
I’ve never been able to fully relate to our society’s ruthless obsession with categorizing everything. Especially when it comes to the notion of love, which has unfortunately fallen prey to these restrictive and reductive tendencies of our species.
I’m not referring to the Shakespearean kind of love – which funnily enough is an example of the categorization I’m referring to – but the type of affinity that occurs naturally between humans. We’ve taken that inherent feeling of togetherness, tenderness, and appreciation toward one another and we’ve broken it down and analysed it to death.
We’re taught to rank our love and have been given various definitive categories that we can sweep that love into. They place limitations on what displays of love are acceptable in our relationships depending on the category it falls into. Like an aisle in a grocery store, we force our love into clearly marked boxes and shelve them accordingly.
Looking for way to show your buddy that he’s appreciated? Try a manly, five-tiered handshake to fist-bump-explosion combo, found in aisle five under “bromance.” Looking for a loving way to say goodnight to your daughter? You’ll find just what you need with a kiss-on-the-forehead located in aisle two – “parent-child relationship.”
As a society we’ve bought into this merciless dissection of love despite the fact that it contradicts everything we truly know about it.
Love is a powerful universal force. By its very nature it is raw, wild, and free. It is not something that is tamed, controlled or bottled but something that is channelled, nurtured, and unleashed. It is not restricted by earthly words and its language is spoken from within.
Yet we rush to bury the budding bulbs of love into the labelled drawers society has marked for us. We throw today’s bulb into a drawer labelled “friend-zone” and tomorrow’s into “too old for me.” In these darkened drawers we keep these bulbs and then actually wonder why the love that blooms is as black as Cornelius van Baerle’s tulip.
I think of all the amazing people in my life and I’ve realized it has been the light of a love that was never bottled that has attracted them into my life, and what has kept them here. It is a love which, admittedly, is a love that can be a little silly at times.
Bromance? Showmance? Or just a bit of silly and wild love?
I’ve given some of my closest male friends big wet kisses on the mouth when I felt the moment called for such a display of love. Despite the fact they are rugged, heterosexual men, they accept my random smooches on the beak because they know where it comes from. They know it comes from a love that is unfiltered and unrelenting. They know that I know their every fault and all of their vices and yet my love has blossomed infinitely regardless of this.
Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.” – Paulo Coelho, The Zahir: A Novel of Obsession.
This is because wild and natural love grows alongside wild and natural acceptance. The people that remain in my life – near and far – are all people who I’ve loved and accepted in this way.
Whether its an unexpected Skype call or a postcard in the mail, I’m constantly reminded of how strong of a bond is created by just loving people with all of my sincerity.
I truly believe those who are in my circle of love – and those I’m grateful to say include me in theirs – are there through very little influence of my own and largely through the natural and powerful selection of love itself.
They have each accepted and embraced my untamed and crazy love – the love of a wild wolf. They have returned that love with as much or as little love as they possibly can. It doesn’t always add up, but love doesn’t keep score. The important thing is that they have accepted my silly love and, in exchange, I’ve accepted theirs. This is how I know all of the people in my life, all of those I hold dear, are supposed to be here with me.
To be honest, I can’t think of anything more pure, noble, and sincere than letting love continue to govern who is and isn’t in my life.
Love is love, and your love belongs to you alone. It isn’t defined by the norms of your culture or your society. It is defined by however you choose to allow that love to manifest itself.
So go out and unleash your love. Let it be silly. Kiss your bestie. Fist bump your mom or pops. Hug it out with that old lady next door.
Be the crazy love you want to see in the world.
Be the unconditional love and acceptance you want in your life. Don’t tame the love of that wild wolf under your skin.
Stop defining your love. Instead, let your love define you.
Be good to each other,
– MG.
Photos Courtesy of:
Cover Art: Two Lovers In An Interior by a Yellow Blind by Suzuki Harunobu Women on a Road Trip: http://www.theplaidzebra.com
Our minds are lined with shelves overflowing with advice that we’ve accumulated over the years. Mental libraries, divided by subjects such as love, life, and happiness. Many of the tomes covering these various subjects are made up of simple but memorable sayings to help us along our path.
Though I believe these expressions are beneficial in keeping the bigger picture in our minds, I find they often lack depth and substance. One such expression I hear used often, and have been guilty of using myself, is:
if you love something, set it free; if it comes back to you, its yours.”
When I paint a picture in my head of what this expression means to me, I picture a person opening a birdcage and letting a yellow canary fly out of a narrow apartment window, or a little boy letting his excited terrier off of the leash in a park. Eventually, both owners have their pets return dutifully back to them. I think this expression serves as a powerful microcosm of the dependent relationship dynamics which characterize many modern romances.
The problem with this expression, and the picture it paints, is it associates the notion of love with both ownership and reliance. I think both the notions of ownership and reliance are contrary to that of love, yet they’ve found a place in many of our intimate relationships.
The one you love is not a car. You didn’t buy him from a salesman. She does not come with ownership papers. In order to set something free you must first be the owner of it (or at least have it in your possession). You had to of restricted his or her freedom in the first place. It seems tragically contradictory to fall in love with something when it is wild and free – whether its a bird soaring in the sky or the beautiful stranger you met on the train – only to try and capture and cage it. We have allowed the complex toxins of private ownership to leak into the simple, pure, and unrestricted stream of love. Loving someone isn’t releasing them. Loving someone is never wanting to cage them in the first place.
Reliance, in my opinion, is a much more subtle and dangerous form of ownership. The canary doesn’t return to its cage out of love, it returns because its the only source of nourishment and drink that it has ever known. The canary has grown to love its chains. It no longer believes in itself. The canary is in a state of dependency and has learned to fear a life without the cage. It fears being apart from the owner it depends on for safety, warmth, food, and water. The decision to return to the owner is both self serving, and convenient. The relationship has, from the outset, fostered a sense of real necessity.
The Bird Cage (1910) by Frederick Carl Frieseke
I see so many words which emerge during conflict in today’s relationships that expose the same sense of necessity. We haveto stay together. We need to work things out. We can’t just give up. These words are followed by the revealing of the foundations of reliance the relationship has been built upon. “She is the only one who understands me.” “No one else will accept me like he does.” “We’ve been through it all together” “I can’t be happy without her.” “I’ll be alone without him.”
We pile up these imagined conclusions as though our world didn’t exist before this person came into our lives. We begin to perceive life with this person as essential to maintaining the things we value in our world. These things range from the relatively narrow in scope, such as a specific circle of friends, a shared living arrangement, custody of the children, or the new puppy, to those broader in scope, such as our ability to be happy, accepted, appreciated, or loved. We become the canary. Our reliance becomes our cage.
I think it’s important to note that not all reliance is bad. Being committed doesn’t mean being caged. Too many people confuse commitment with a lack of freedom. Being in a relationship doesn’t mean being reliant on someone else. I really do hope the people in my life that I love the most know they can rely on me. I hope they know they can come to me for any type of help – for advice (although I can’t promise it will be very good advice), when they are feeling blue, need a shoulder to cry on, a wing man for the night, a hug, the shirt off of my back, or all of the above.
I want my significant other to rely on me. I want her to be certain she can rely on me for unconditional love, acceptance, and support for the rest of her days.
But there is a major difference between being in a relationship where you can rely on one another, and one where one (or both) of you feel like you must rely on your significant other.
In the former situation, a couple is adding additional wind under each others’ wings. In the latter scenario, one or both partners are chained to the other by shackles cast in iron reliance.
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” – Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays.
We must be the canary without the cage. Be responsible for your own happiness, acceptance, self-belief, growth, success, and well-being, because no one else can ever give you those things. Don’t create your own prison by accepting the delusion that someone can.
And, as much as you may want to, you can’t provide any of those things for another person, either. So don’t be the one caging another canary with promises to provide them with those things.
Instead, accept that you are responsible for your own life, and others have the same obligation to themselves as you do. The sooner you do that, the sooner you’ll find another canary just as wild, free, and as perfect as you are.
There is nothing more powerful than a love that is born out of love. I can’t think of anything more pure or beautiful than two souls soaring together for no reason other than the mutual respect and endless love they share for one another. That is a flight that will last an eternity.
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MICHAEL GIORGI 