How to Find Love at Anytime
You see someone you love. They once loved you too.
You miss the emotion. You may never feel it again. At least, for a passing moment in time, you knew what it was like to care about someone regardless of what occurs.
For those spare moments, you did not care about judgement. You try to describe what you felt incessantly, forever pondering the meaning of this thing you can’t describe.
That’s the key, the final key, or at least the keyhole that unlocks the key itself. Describe what you felt and how you felt it, and love will be within your grasp, your world changed forever.
Soon you think about things that had not been pondered before. You have trouble finding more ideas to pursue in search of this mysterious emotion’s description.
You have surpassed what can be found in the immediate moment. What is love? How do you describe it? How do you sum up the emotion you so desire in a map that can be used to find the path? These questions are repeated to no avail.
Quickly, your travels take a dark turn. There is nothing to live for. You have searched, and searched, and turned every stone of rational thought. You feel like you’ve just flipped a mountain.
Your journey for a map of love itself only ends at the beginning.
There isn’t a single line drawn on the map. There is literally nothing there for you to interpet. There are no dichotomies. Opposites do not exist on what you have drawn. Your current description of love is nothing at all. It is just there, a blank depiction of what you see as a failed journey.
You start to realize this love you are searching for cannot be found with rationality. It can only be described as a single instance of the smallest unit of complexity in a vacuum of space. There is no system surrounding love. Love does not operate. It only exists, on a scale below rationality. If you could figure out what rationality is derived from, maybe then you could understand why love cannot be understood.
Then, as you become overwhelmed with the despair of this futile quest, it dawns upon you. Like the interpreted drawings on a map, rationality comes from nothing. The simplest form of knowledge, the least amount of complexity that can ever exist in a single system, is nothing. That’s all there is to know with love. You can only know nothing.
Finally, you are taken softly by a strange satisfaction. Love is based upon nothing, and that’s why it is everything. Love does not have logic. Rationality and description are a form of judgement. Love is not. Love occurs in the absence of logic. Love occurs when you lose judgement entirely. It requires the eliminated of reaction, of cause and effect.
Before you even began the journey, your quest was complete. There was no need to edit the blank sheet of parchment you had withdrawn from your dull cupboard. You already had the answer in your hands. The map of love consists only of nothing.
Originally published at https://blog.haysstanford.com on October 21, 2018.
