Essential Meaning of love
1
: a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person
2
: warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion
Ah February, the month of love. Some are celebrating their relationships, some are mourning their lack of one. No matter the circumstance, we’re all surrounded by this seemingly magical force we call love. It’s all around us, yet it’s so easy for us to feel like we are lacking, that others have more of it than we do.
Perhaps your friend is in a relationship and you are not.
Perhaps you feel like your parents give more attention to your siblings than to you.
Perhaps you’re in a relationship and feel like you are giving more to your partner than what you’re receiving.
Perhaps you are grieving a loss and don’t know how to deal with all the love you still have for that person.
It’s not easy to be going through any of these feelings of lack, yet it’s a natural part of our human experience.
How can we reclaim some of this love and caring in ourselves?
In my opinion it’s helpful to think of it like the sea, the ebb and flow of the waves, the tide coming in and out. There are always phases to love and to life itself.
Everybody’s life is like the sea, and sometimes you can be perfectly in sync with someone, your waves matching up, washing away at the beach together. Yet there are times where you fall out of rhythm, out of familiar pattern, they retreat when you crash and vice versa. This doesn’t mean that you will never get back to the collective rhythm. It just means that maybe for right now you are on a separate wavelength.
These stutters in the collective rhythm often leave us feeling confused and grieving what was. But it too is an opportunity to acquaint ourselves with our own unique rhythm. Our own relationship with love and with ourselves. We can end up finding so much comfort in our patterns. Of recognizing that even when the tide is low and out, it’s not gone forever. It will return to us, sometimes even with a vengeance, sometimes it will feel like we’re drowning in it. Our love is not lost, maybe it’s getting ready to crash into us headfirst. To hit us with something we never even could have imagined.
Even when you can’t see it, it is never truly gone, never not gonna come back in some form or another.
So whatever you do, seek comfort in the fact that even when it feels like you’re lacking in love, like you will never feel it again, don’t worry, It will flow back, then recede, flow back and recede: the endless dance. You can’t give 100% of yourself, without something being taken, it’s the law of nature.
Still, I hope you find comfort in the ebb and flow, in the dance. Once you accept it as the natural order, it doesn’t feel so devastating when it stutters. And when it does, when you feel like you’ll never encounter that feeling of love again, just you wait, the world has so much in store for you. Observe the momentary stillness, and yet how everything will bloom again, how the bees will kiss the flowers, how the winter will give way to new life in spring, and how all of this might just be love itself. Everywhere, all around us, no matter the season, no matter the tide, no matter the rhythm.
Hear the whispers, I love you.