On this valentine’s day, I decided to write a blog on Love, excerpts from a love letter I wrote to the love of my life once, during the worst time period of our relationship when it was at the brink of breaking. I do not have great writing skills yet, so I will just try to use words of great writers, time to time, to express the same thing I have experienced. In a way, it is just an exploration, unstructured but basically it is a letter and read it as a letter.
This is how I began the letter, “Writing you this letter because it is the question of what matters and what not! And without any doubts, any thoughts, I can say you and our connection whatever it may be, matter the most for me, and I think it is the same for you if you will intervene your feelings and your heart.
No amount of words will justify what I have to express in front of you, for you. It probably might not make any sense, it might seem foolish but for others, for you I know by heart, it matters the most!
We have been indulging in this stupidities for a while, trying and failing to fool ourselves! To fool our hearts! We made mistakes, we did let all these outer things and worldly norms affect our beautiful story, I feel pity about that, don’t you? We let this stupid mind speak up against our heart! How stupid we are!?
It caused a lot of pain, it still does, this disconnection, not of this distance but what we created by our own stupidity. It made me go through my mind and heart if not millions than thousands times. I had to probe my own self, I had to see through your eyes too and then there was this heart!
I have tried to explore myself, yourself, our story and this mysterious phenomenon called Love. Though words do not matter, please try to feel instead.”
What is love?
“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love,” said Susan Sontag.
But if the mystery of love is so impenetrable and the gauntlet through it so rife with peril, how is it that we saunter into it so blindly and so clumsily yet so irrepressibly full of hope? Why, if the risks are so great and the rewards so uncertain, do we love at all?
Dr. Harry Harlow was one of most notable psychologist and this what he had to say after conducting experiments and having a scientific approach to everything: “Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned mission as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in this mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists.”
Love is knowing and understanding. Do you think we know each other like nobody else does? Do you think we understand each other like nobody else does? Do you think it is so common to happen and happens all the time in life?
It was not the moment we met we fell in love. We have made love out of it, we have gone through all the phases, and this one is the hardest one I guess. We have stood stall against all odds and we always will, our story till now shows everything. I have faith in us though it is being tested right now.
In what remains the greatest definition of love, Tom Stoppard described the real thing as “knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremism, the mask slipped from the face.” And yet the grandest paradox of love — the source of its necessary frustration, the root of the inescapable lover’s sulk — is our insistence on crafting and putting on ever more elaborate masks under the mistaken belief that these idealized selves, presented to the object of our infatuation, would render us more desirable and worthier of love. We tuck our messy real selves behind polished veneers, orchestrate grand gestures, and perform various psycho-emotional acrobatics driven by the illusion that love is something we must earn by what we do, rather than something that comes to us unbidden simply for who we are.
Don’t you think we have gone into deepest levels of our feelings, emotions and heart? Don’t you think we have touched our souls?
We all try to seek for happiness and joy all the time! We look to be happy all the time and that is why we face such pain, we try to neglect it, try to remove it somehow and make such decisions! But in fact, this pain, this suffering, this sadness is the one what shows us what is true, it shows us what matters and that is why it pains! It is question to be asked to ourselves, why we feel this pain? What is the cause? Who is the cause?
“Nature, the soul, love … one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason,” 16-year-old Dostoyevsky
On, some elemental level, we intuit this to be true, and yet we somehow let ourselves forget it as we grow older and more reliant on the intellect as our supreme mode of knowing. We seem to remember it only in moments of suffering — of emotional intensity so acute and uncontrollable that it strips down our rationalizations and deposits us, naked and unguarded, into the cradle of our own being. The wisdom of the heart that we reap in that vulnerable state is of a wholly different order than the intellectual insight we synthesize through deliberate rational thought. what makes emotional suffering most anguishing is precisely that we so stubbornly resist it for, on some level, we judge it as anti-intellectual.
In The Captive & The Fugitive, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust shines a penetrating side-wise gleam on this paradox of how the intellect, in its coolly rational search for facts, blinds us to the larger truths of our emotional reality. Shortly after the protagonist has completed a rigorous intellectual analysis of his feelings for his romantic partner, Albertine, and concluded that he no longer loves her, he receives news of her death. He is suddenly overcome by such uncontainable and uncontrollable sorrow that the truth — a truth his intellect had rejected but his heart encoded far more deeply — was revealed to him: He does, after all, love Albertine tremendously. I had believed that I was leaving nothing out of account, like a rigorous analyst; I had believed that I knew the state of my own heart. But our intelligence, however lucid, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallized salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.
“Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.” Martin Heidegger
Reasoning has no space. We can not allow it take over our feelings, our hearts, which we actually are what we feel. Or there will always be this pain and sorrow. There will be these regrets, there will be this missing, I see a lot of old people regretting, a lot of people regretting about letting go of their beloved ones, after all why? At their deathbeds, the only thing mattered to them and the only thing they missed was this. We do not want to be one of them, and it is in our hands, it is our choice.
And there is this past too, it affects our thoughts in present and we sometimes do not even know it! I can not say much about your past experiences because you do not say much but I know you, I understand you. Some things are still hanging there subconsciously. And I believe it is my fault and my responsibility to take it away from you. I also, still linger in past experiences and teachings and thoughts at some point and it have caused me a tremendous pain.
If our parents didn’t love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like? … The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness. Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people. If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all.
We cannot understand [a person’s] love … without knowing a great deal about the history of patterns of attachment that extend back into [the person’s] childhood. Past loves shadow present attachments, and take up residence within them. This, in turn, suggests that in order to talk well about them we will need to turn to texts that contain a narrative dimension, thus deepening and refining our grasp of ourselves as beings with a complicated temporal history.
That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.
There is also a question of reality, we do ask question, what is real and what is not? I wonder what was more unreal, acknowledging our feelings despite of distance or giving up this way despite of our feelings? We said words, but then why I do not feel it that we broke up? It looks more like a break! We have been on a break before too and as you know got back together. The later part is the reality I believe.
“Nothing awakens us to the reality of life so much as a true love,” Vincent van Gogh.
In the end, I tried to express it with a poetry:
“In faith,
In love,
Feeling what you feel,
Feel what I feel,
Not words,
I am about to show you,
Just be with me
Till then.
I am not afraid,
I am not helpless,
Anymore.
Stop denying,
Accept my love
And let me accept yours.
I am coming to you…
I am coming to you…
My Love!
My Soulmate!”
We all know, how hard it is to express when we were taught to control ourselves since childhood! This was my honest try to bring it to the surface. What do you think about love?
A video to watch: Why do we love? A philosophical inquiry – Skye C. Cleary
Facebook post:
What is Love? Why are you so afraid to express your love?
Read this honest letter: https://algonquincollegesocialmedia.wordpress.com/2017/02/13/love-a-letter-to-my-love
Twitter post:
What is Love? Valentine is here but are you? check out this blog: https://algonquincollegesocialmedia.wordpress.com/2017/02/13/love-a-letter-to-my-love
#love #valentine’s #letter
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 