lessons

my idea of love was once like my knowledge of God: it exists, you can seek it, it can be called upon, and will answer you if you just pray hard enough. and it took me almost twenty years to realize that all of these ideas about loving are not necessarily true.

i might have once been tagged by my friends as a love doctor (now that's a different kind of internist!), but i am no specialist. in fact, i do not know love at all, i am still in the process of learning it. so lest i forget what i have learned so far, i am going to chronicle it all here.

we can't choose who we love. we may already have a list of ideals but unless we're extremely blessed, we won't get the entire package in one person. because when we fall in love, we will lose sense of it all. call it fate, love, luck, or the lack of it, we just know we feel it for that person.

love != happiness. for non-programmers, that means love does not equate to happiness. if i may put it this way, love > happiness. it is a deal lot more. it makes us happy, also kicks our ass, makes us fools, humbles us, gives us strength and so on. therefore we can't expect love to make us always happy.

love = happiness. let me finish that. love and happiness are the same in the sense that we cannot pursue them. pursuing love (or happiness) is a tiresome chase, one moment you think you're close to having it, just to realize it has slipped from your hands the next. love and happiness are but after-effects, they ensue; in other words, in order to be loved, be worth loving.

love is patient. the bible got this right. loving takes patience, a huge amount of it. for one, the opposite of the first learning is true: you can't force someone to love you. funny isn't it? we can fall madly in love with someone and yet, we have no hold on that person to reciprocate. where does patience fit in this picture? it is in waiting for the person you love to love you back or in waiting for the next one to come along.

walkaway when we should. love maybe patient, but it should not be utterly foolish. when we fall for someone and it doesn't work out, we release ourselves. it is no one's fault, it just was not meant to be. recognizably a cliche, but that pretty much hits the point. time doesn't stop even if we think it did for a moment once we realize it is over. we should stop punishing ourselves for one lost love because we could possibly be holding ourselves back from the one that will last.

now going back to my analogy of love and God, still one of the things which remains true, is that love, like God, is definitely something beyond our capacity to comprehend.

at the end of the day, these thoughts are born of my own experience and logic; thus, they may not hold a grain of truth. that is the beauty of life: as we live, we are able to create our own understanding of love.