Love.

Love.

As a writer, you know what needs to be written. It builds inside of you and starts to take up space until you give it room to breathe and release. That’s how this piece has felt to me over the last couple of days.

I’m currently in a beautiful kitchen, in a beautiful home, situated in a satisfying enough city.

The blue skies are probably my favourite. It still feels a little small to me, but in all fairness, the world feels small to me.

I’ve been here five days and counting. Five days of family, writing, reading, quiet, loudness, heaviness, questions, not so many answers, but five days nonetheless. Five days where I’ve observed and absorbed, five days of letting my thoughts run amok to all the corners and crevices, the pits and mountainous peaks, the faraway places, voyages, mirages, dreamscapes and every other world and dimension that potentially exists beyond ours.

I know what you’re thinking. What is this kid on? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No drugs, no psychedelics, no sugars, no MSG. Not even alcohol, friends.

I take two sugars in my coffee every morning, and then read to my little heart’s content. I take a cold shower in the evening, and then sit with my senses­. I taste my food, I hear words and pay attention to voices.

I really try to listen to people: to their inflections, their histories and their victories. There is a lot to be learnt. I say this all the time, but there really is a vault of infinence that as humans we always seem to be on the outside of. It’s out of our reach. This grand portal that holds all the answers and hows and whys to every existential and moral dilemma to ever exist, is entirely out of our reach. The universe works mentally, but I think this physical form I carry my soul in, this fragile and vulnerable body, is what keeps me here. Lost. Searching. Found. Hurting.

My mind isn’t a fun place. It bites more than it can chew. I’m learning to spit things out sometimes. Take smaller bites. Let things go. Food for thought is infinite. I will always find it. Not everything has to be processed instantly. I can come back. I can let things marinate. Some things I’m simply not ready for.

It’s kind of how I spent twenty years telling myself I did not like raspberries, to then find that I do like raspberries. I don’t like them on their own, but I like them in my yoghurt and granola accompanied by their fellow quiet and humble friends, the blueberries. Even now, I’m acutely aware that although I’ve said I don’t like raspberries on their own, I don’t have any empirical, qualitative evidence that supports that claim. It’s simply a truth I’ve held for however many years for whatever reason, and hasn’t been challenged by experience.

I let things marinate a lot now. I allow them to be. I get on with life and other things in the meantime while the experiences I don’t quite understand work silently in the background making connections and disconnections to reach rationales that no amount of mind mapping or logical argument could reach, to then fully break these apart again when a new bad boy piece of information arrives on the scene.

It’s exhausting, that’s why you can’t do it consciously. The awareness that every belief and value is only as strong as the present moment, is somewhat overwhelming. But that is the beauty of being human. Our minds are easily distracted, and can only handle a few things at once, so you redirect all that processing power to the things you do have control of: your work, your eating habits, your water intake. What time you wake up in the morning. The clothes you wear. The glasses you like. And so on. Just like that, life simplifies. It simplifies into moments, because those are all we really have.

So, what is love?

Google it and I’m sure you’ll come across hundreds and thousands of articles trying to describe it. There’s most definitely a definition in the dictionary too.

[Love: an intense feeling of deep affection.]

All these definitions and pages of information, yet we’ve been asking the same question for decades. It’s a funny one. We don’t ask what electricity is. We know what it is.

[Electricity: a form of energy resulting from the existence of charged particles (such as electrons or protons), either statically as an accumulation of charge or dynamically as a current.]

The definition of electricity is satisfying. It applies now, today, tomorrow and will apply in ten years, twenty years’ time too.

Love is slightly harder. An intense feeling of deep affection? Already I am inclined to question this further.

You cannot summarise love in six words. The same way these four words below do not satisfy justice. How banal to think it does, when Plato has ten books older than most countries and cities you could name, concerning justice, the just city-state and just man.

[Justice: just behaviour or treatment.]

So again, back to our original question. What is love?

I have pondered, consciously and subconsciously I’m sure, (I’m certain my mind wheels have been turning on this subject for years) and for now, I’ve reached a new ideology. I am now testing this exact ideology through the trials and tribulations of everyday life.

I think love is a kindness we give freely, and a kindness we feel when it is given freely to us.

Too many times, I have looked around and not seen love in the places where I’m told it should exist: in a seven-year relationship, in the church halls of a marriage ceremony, in a parent and child.

And too many times I have found love in places I hadn’t accounted for.

In poetry. In the soft purring of a cat as it watches you work across the desk. In the robust hug delivered to someone who watched you enter this world and changed countless diapers of yours, who you then didn’t see for years even though you could have, but who only ever held love for you, and years later in a stroke of tragic or maybe formative timing, it is you holding her head in your hands.

To hug tighter and cradle is instinctive, even if you’ve never been here before. It is you being a pillar of strength and a warm, beating heart that can be felt and heard, while another lays still, covered by a white sheet, surrounded by flower arrangements and low, condolent eyes– none quite sure what to say. So you do what you know: you give love, freely, to someone who has just lost the love that they gave and received freely for 50 years.

I found love even in him as he lay there. He loved me. It made me think of all the people who gave love freely to me, needing nothing in return. That’s a hard one to stomach. Guilt gutted me. I know we lead distracting and consuming lives, but how sad that we forget to give love, to give people their flowers while they are still here. Life isn’t ours to hold… it comes and goes, but guilt stays.

I know guilt stays. I carried guilt for nine years in the form of a Jack Russell. A gorgeous little brown and white terrier, who literally wore her heart on her fur.

A delightful spirit, who showed me love, freely.

And yet I failed her.

I failed her because I didn’t show love. I was concerned with my life. Where I needed to be and what I needed to do. I cut her walk short that day. I put her lead on hurriedly. I remember the exact route I took, I remember making the decision. A selfish decision. She had a whole field ahead of her. Her little legs would have taken her across the entire green. Fresh air ruffling the fur beneath her ears. It would have been an extra ten minutes of my day, but the highlight of hers.

Dizzy died that day. By no fault of her own, but every one of mine. And I cried. I cried a tonne.

I remember seeing the car coming, and freezing. I locked in place. After that, I didn’t want another furry friend. But Marley, a slightly dopey looking ball of fur would join our family months later.

It would be years before I showed him love, even though he always showed me it first. At some point in this, you become the villain. Love is contagious. You cannot stay mad at it. You cannot stay angry, or indifferent to love. It softens even the stoniest defences and draws blood from the iciest of caverns. It’s a force of nature.

Yet as free and forceful as it is, it’s not easy. It’s often a choice.

Love was my dad’s choice to pick me up on New Year’s Eve, and drive around looking for somewhere I could purchase my Calvin Klein underwear. It was only important to me. It didn't matter to him. But in that moment, on that day, he went out of his way because to me, CK underwear held all the significance. Love is paying the insurance premium on my sister’s car, because why not? Just because I had to struggle, doesn’t mean she has to. I hope she relishes in it. Love is choosing kindness for no other reason than the kindness itself.

Love doesn’t hold grudges. It's playful.

It may be a little frightful at first too, but with time, it grows roots and find its way.

That's what love does. It creeps around like ivy. If you cut it down, you’ll always know you did. Love used to grow here.

Love is adding my friend’s birthdays to my phone calendar, so no matter how busy life gets, I never miss a birthday. This is something that I have only started to do in recent times.

Love is being honest, even when it hurts. I’m still not very good at this one. I’m good at answering honestly, but initiating difficult conversations is hard for me. What sucks big time is that the compounded snowball effect of not having those early conversations, always ends up hurting more than the initial discussion ever could. Life, right?

The one thing that really confuses me about love, is when it somehow ceases to exist somewhere it once bloomed. I don’t know anything about that. I don’t think it’s possible to be honest.

So there you have it. A few examples of what I think love is and how it manifests. I know I’ll keep learning more about it, I know situations and experiences will continue to shape my understanding, sometimes smoothing out the edges and sometimes a particular blow can create a sharp, jagged edge, but nonetheless, it’s a sculpture I’ll continue to sculpt.

Happy New Year folks. All the love always,

S.