“How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream.” Khalil Gibran
The notion of love has always bewildered me. There is a rise in the literature that strives to define it and explain this intricate life force, and yet I still find it as elusive as ever. And I have no intention to pin it down here either. In its ideal form, ‘love’ connotes various positive values like nurture, care, growth etc. However, stifling, obsessive, compulsive are for some people expressions of love too, whether we like it or not.
Love takes many forms and guises depending on the type of relationship in which it thrives, but I’m interested mostly in romantic love. That high charge emotion that at moments gives us soul-expanding sensations, and at others, crushes our very sense of being.
As a teenager, I used to follow celebrities’ life stories on “E! Entertainment Television” channel. I noticed a pattern that I didn’t quite understand back then. At the peak of a star’s career, he or she often meets up with the ‘love of his life’ or ‘her soulmate’. Sweeping love comes in to crown professional achievement, but their career eventually suffers a dip. And life, more often than not, crumbles thereafter. Strangely enough, the sweeping love fades too. Well, there is nothing actually strange here.
Your ability to love and be loved has to do with what’s happening inside of you – more than anything. That’s why obsessiveness may seem like a form of love too, only for a person who is struggling on their growth path. At the peak of their careers, stars and even regular people reflect behaviour and feelings that are aligned with the high vibration of love. Thus, they attract seemingly perfect love. The problem is that they attach much of their professional success to their sense of self and when they lose that, they concomitantly lose the love.
It is a wise piece of advice not to get into a relationship before having some stability in your life, but I would add to that a strong sense of self too – a self that is enriched by both successes and failures. The ability to love stems from the ability to hold one’s self and another in a constant state of appreciation. It takes a healed person to be able to love.
Only when you can find this connection with yourself that you can find it with another. That’s why this deep soulful connection, where you see part of yourself in the other – hold their gaze, share their breath and be able to unite physically, spiritually and mentally with them, is very rare to find. In fact, people can go through lifetimes before realizing that this enchantment can actually exist. Most people merely couple with others not to be alone, hoping that this ‘other’ would fill the gaps in their lives and offer something special that would make life worth living. But of course, it never works that way. You need to make life worth living first. Only then, perhaps, when you say I love you- it means I’m secure enough to lose myself in you.
