Thursday, August 7, 2008

What is Love

I have this habit of reading thoughts, proverbs, phrases etc. for passing time at work. I think I understand things better when I read other peoples point of view on it. It makes my thinking more spherical. Anyway, yesterday I was reading about LOVE. Maybe I was trying to find purls of wisdom in my five year marriage. Maybe I was feeling like a teenager in love eager to find what more was out there of the stuff that I was feeling. I just Googled it expecting to get good meanings of the word. The faithful Wikipedia called it the “Central Psychological Emotion”. There was someone there who even went to the extent of actually giving a comparison of scientific models to show how Love was modeled in Biology and Psychology. That sounded, well, meaningful but did not strike a chord. So that was not something that I was looking for. I kept following links in hope of finding something that would resonate with what I was feeling. Well I did find one that came pretty close.

“To describe love is very difficult, for the same reason that words cannot fully describe the flavor of an orange. You have to taste the fruit to know its flavor. So with love.”

I liked this for two reasons. One because of the abstraction used in comparing love to a fruit and the second because whoever thought of this chose a fruit which was sometimes sweet and sometimes sour. :-) Thats the truth about Love isn't it? It is sweet for the lucky one's who have just fallen into it, sour for the one's who have to live without it and a little bit of both for the ones who eventually stand after having fallen in it. Its when you stand in it that you actually know the meaning of unconditional love. Unconditional Love is the only kind of true love there is. Saint Paul said “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends”.

You can tell if you love someone when your heart aches and races, your face is flushed but your hands and feet get cold, you stomach turns and you get tingly all over at the sight of that person. Its either love or you are seriously coming down with a deadly illness..ha ha ha. But then again isn't real love like a lifelong illness that once you get, you can never get out of it? I don't know what it is to fall out of Love. Thankfully I say for myself. Coz I don't know what I would do without it. I would be lost. Love helps me find my way, everyday. My road to self-discovery is paved with Love. My ability to love keeps me going. Thankyou God for making me one of the lucky one's.

P.S: My 2 year old son Aarnav cannot say "Love" but his favorite song right now is (in his words) "What is la"