The story of every soul begins with once upon a time. Wait a minute, if every story begins with once upon a time like a children’s book as if it were about to be a fairy tale, how does it end up being a horror story by the time you reach teenage years? If by horror story, some of my readers have already understood that I am talking about love, then yes I am!
LOVE, a four letter word that makes you feel like the world has suddenly turned into a happy place is often misunderstood. Now what exactly is love? I, myself am not capable enough to give it a meaning yet but I think everyone has their own definition.
Everyone wants to fall in love. But I think people are more in love with the theory of love. It’s the strongest emotion but also the darkest. It has it’s own level of high like drugs but it can wrap an anchor around your feet and drown you in less than a minute.
I have heard Love is Passion. Passion my friend, makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working or feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path. No one wants their life thrown into chaos. Some people keep this threat under control and do not react, while other people do exactly the opposite. They surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find a solution in passion to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their sorrow. They are either euphoric that something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has completely ruined their life. Which one of these attitudes is the least destructive to decide the better option?- I don’t know. All I know is that love cannot be passion because it can neither make you euphoric nor depressed.
There was once a bird with beautiful feathers and seeing him fly across the sky, a woman fell in love with him. She saw his flight in amazement with sparkling eyes and a pounding heart. She admired and celebrated the bird. At the same time, she felt envious that he might go far away one day and hence never come back. She decided to trap the bird in a cage so that she might never feel alone again and have him all to herself. Although she succeeded in her plan, the bird, unable to fly lost all his beauty, became dull and eventually died. The woman felt terribly sad. If she had looked deeply within herself, she might have realized that what got her thrilled was the bird’s flight, full of charm and energy. It was his wings in motion and not his body that made her crazy about him in the very first place. Hence, love requires freedom. If you try to bound it with rules and traps, you might end up loosing it forever.
According to Plato, men and women were not as they are now, there was just one being, considered to have both the man and woman body glued back to back. It has been said that Zeus, the supreme lord of Olympus has said to have split the creature with four arms and four legs to lose some of it’s strength. Hence he cut the creature into two halves resulting in two bodies. It’s said that finding one’s other half in this world and embracing him is the journey of what we call falling in love.
Love doesn’t need to be romantic and it doesn’t need to be felt only for your better half. We learn how to love from our mother’s womb and she is the first person we ever love for she protects us within herself unconditionally. Love doesn’t need to be defined in relations. It changes it’s meaning with every person you come across in your life. Hence, it can never be constant.
Everyone knows how to love because we are all born with that gift. Some people have a natural talent for it but majority of us have to relearn, to remember how to love, and everyone, without exception needs to burn on the bonfire of past emotions, to relive certain joys and griefs, certain ups and downs until they can see the invisible connecting thread between the two hearts.