Crazy little thing called

Happy St. Valentine's Day everyone. I hope it is coming along nicely for you all.

It's an interesting day to be sure, and it sings along rather well with a question I've kept stumbling across recently.

Namely, 'What is love?'
Which I suppose that's at the heart of what this day is about.

What a question.


For most of my life I've always thought of it this way; that love is an emotion.
A warm, fuzzy sort of emotion typically associated with the colour red or pink, in the same way happiness is so obviously yellow (of course, when you really consider it, happiness has more of purpley-brownish tinge). Or something electrifying and shocking, that will suddenly strike like a sneaky assassin and overcome you
like a crusty old sponge would feel dropped into the ocean.
Or that moment when a student looks up to see a hitherto hidden onslaught of SACs on the horizon.
I don't think that so much anymore.

Now, I've begun to see that as a grossly constricted understanding of 'love' - if indeed it holds any truth at all.


And this is why:
If love is naught but a feeling, it is inescapably selfish.
Because a feeling is, by definition, exclusive, and self-centered. No matter how much you feel love for a person, that has no effect on them.
In the same way but on a different road, your anger or hate may have no effect on a person if you still, by force of will, treat them gently and with care.

What affects others is WHAT YOU DO.
Now, of course, our feelings often dictate what we do, if we allow them, and if you feel love for a person, it will probably affect how you act towards them.
But that is besides the point.
The emotion has not included the other person into the exclusive feeling of love.
Only by acts, by decisions, has love been shared.

A typical example is in any newly married couple, who are wrapped in that fuzzy warm love together as they journey off together into the golden sunrise of their new life. But when that fuzzy feeling is gone (as it surely will get bored and sneak quietly out the door like a double-dealing little cat),
when the sunset slips over the horizon and night comes on.
What then?
If love is a feeling and the feeling has gone, what is the point? Why stay.
Feelings are fickle, they come and they go, today then tomorrow. And if a person is only in love as long as the feeling is there,
why stay once it goes.

If love is only feeling.

But personally I can't believe that. I know better than to say that love is for me and my benefit alone. That it is inescapably selfish. And love is the one thing that most surely isn't selfish.
I know that love is more.


So, the answer:
that feelings mean so little, next to nothing. As farts in the wind.

What matters is what you do.
And just so, love is so much more than a passing fancy, any fuzzy, fragile, inconsequential, unsubstantial, emotion.
It is a decision, a will, solidified in an act.

Specifically, as I have come to understand it, wishing the good of another in what you do.
Giving.

What this means is that greatest love is sacrifice. True sacrifice. True gift.
With no thought for yourself, no glory, no consolation to gain, nothing expected in return.
Simply giving, because you love.
Even if you find yourself without,
even if you find yourself hurt,
even if you will lose everything you are and have
you give.

What this means is that love is hard, incredibly so. What ridiculous strength it demands!

It means that love will leave you broken, and empty (although you'll find that somehow, from somewhere, there is always more to give).
Sometimes even unloved in return.

It means love will hurt.

It means that it is not about you.

It means that love is not exclusive, that you can give it to all and anyone.
As simply as with a smile (yes indeed, the glory and power of a forced smile).

It is not important on just one day of the year.

It means that Mother Teresa - living in a perpetual darkness, in a never ending struggle against an ocean of suffering, an unrelenting life of giving everything to everyone she could - loved so much more, so much greater than Casinova, Shakespeare, Paris and Helena combined. And she asked nothing in return.
She was stronger than any one of them.

And she also made that hideous ocean somewhat smaller.

Feelings mean nothing, nothing at all. They dance about us like pixies, ever-morphing
like the trippiest dream, or nightmare.

What matters is what you do.



PS. A curt and dignified nod to Andre F for the idea and solid chat.