Thursday, August 9, 2012

Scared.


I've started this blog about three times trying to collect my thoughts in order for it to have some semblance of coherence.  I apologize in advance if my thoughts seem disjointed and scattered.  Emotions have been a topic of conversation over the last few weeks among my friends. I think it's part and parcel with where we all are in our lives at this point but for some reason it keeps coming back up so I think it's time to air it out a bit...
e·mo·tion (noun) :  A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling.
Love is obviously an emotion.  Some might argue the most powerful and universal of all of them, but I think what we tend to, pardon the pun, romanticize is the operative term "spontaneous" when it comes to understanding the true nature of love.  In random conversations about this, I recently had an epiphany and as a self-proclaimed hopeless romantic, the following sentence is quite possibly one of the more jarring revelations I've had to date...
...promising to love someone forever is futile.
Just reading those words feels like glass in my eyes, but after further contemplation it led to a rather interesting theory.  Lets consider the very complicated concept of commitment as it applies to emotion.  I submit that committing to an emotion makes no sense.  Don't believe me?  Let's for the purpose of argument, replace the word "love" with another very recognizable emotion: Fear.
So, the previously romantic proclamation would thus read:
"My dear, I promise that I will be scared of you forever."
It doesn't even sound logical.  The reason that is, is because there are a number of factors that are obvious when it comes to inducing fear.  However, eventually if all things remain constant, fear just starts to fade.  There's a level of desensitization involved and a level of understanding what you're actually afraid of that eventually pushes things towards the mundane.  Thus, one shouldn't make that promise.  I'm not promising that I'm going to be scared of you forever, I'm promising that I want to be.  I'm promising that I will work on it, constantly... and if you continue to be scary and want to scare me, I promise to be receptive. I promise to think of new ways to scare you, and that I will try and be the scariest person I can be to you and if for some reason, what I'm doing doesn't scare you anymore, we'll figure out what did, does, and will.
“If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.” ~Madeleine L'Engle 
Love (noun) is a feeling, love (verb) is a choice. I feel this is a powerful distinction. Love isn't automatic, it takes work, it takes constant visitation, mutual reciprocation, foolish risks, and deep patience. Ironically, as much as we're all searching for it, love is an emotion that I feel we don't treat this way. We tend to look upon it as something that can be attained; focusing too much on it as something that just happens to us and not as something that we do. Acting as if once we've reached the destination, the journey should end. Which, for people who think this way, it often does... typically as abruptly as it started. What one needs to do is not commit to the spontaneous reaction, the uncontrollable feeling that comes over you, the emotion itself; but rather the person that makes you feel this way. This commitment is what love is.

... I think?

I suppose the challenge still lies in finding a person worthy of such efforts... which is something different all together.

“...the truth about forever is that it is happening right now” 


 

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