Love ... is who we are

I thought my life had ended. I wanted to quit school. I didn’t want to see my friends or family. I suddenly lost all interest in sports. I didn’t even want to eat.

There exist few - if any - pains in this life sharper to the soul than a broken heart. “Love hurts”, wailed in truth the Seventies rock band, Nazareth.

I was a teenager. The first “love of my life” had broken up with me (yes, on good terms - in fact, we remain in touch to this day - but it was still “all over”).

(And like all young people in love everywhere, we had both once swore without a shred of doubt that our love would last forever.)

I may (or may not) be the exception, but I have been completely, totally, head-over-heels “in love” several times in my life since that first one.

Many of my friends apparently vouch for having had just “one true love” in their lives. I don’t begrudge them.

But I am far from envying them. I have had a wonderful life, exactly as it unfolded. Even counting all the breaks of the heart.

Perhaps even directly because of all those heartbreaks, I have learned to love everyone and everybody I have met in my life all the more.

Yes, we do well when we recognize that there are many “forms and flavors” of love. Perhaps as many as there are people on the planet.

It’s such a shame that the English language has but one word for love.

The ancient Greeks had at least four distinctly separate words for love. And I can immediately think of a need for many more than four myself.

No greater wordsmith has the world ever known than ol’ Billy Shakespeare. Yet even the Bard himself admittedly was at a loss to describe love.

Alas, we may not all agree on exactly what love is … but we all know it when we feel it.

Biologically, emotionally, and spiritually speaking, love is everything.

Without our experiencing at least one of love’s many forms and flavors, life can appear to grow completely dark and meaningless. After all, love is why we are here. Love is “who we are”.

Apparently the Almighty shares much the same sentiment and reasoning as we mere mortals. All of Earth’s major religions unanimously uplift love as the epitome of our existence. My favorite verse from all of religious scripture is, “God is love”.

Through the long lens of time I can now see that love is (and always was) good - in all love’s countless categories and mysterious ways.

Back to my “first”. She now lives far away in a big city, having been very happily married for years, with several wonderful children and even more grandchildren. Once every few years or so, we still chat a few words on Facebook.

Though we somehow always stop short of putting it into words, we both know that we will always (in some wondrous, miraculous way) have a type of love for one another.

My “original flame” and yours truly are not in any way being unfaithful to anyone else in our lives. We are simply being human. We know our love is now as far from the romance we once had as the east is from the west. Our love is now something much different, higher, and evermore indescribable. (Since I have become friends with so many people across my lifetime, about half of whom are female, I’ve come to see “true unconditional friendship love” as perhaps the most fulfilling love of all.)

Indeed, love can morph and change over time. Given enough time, love can morph and change a lot.

Many of my friends, the ones who’ve had that “one true love” for a lifetime, have shared with me how the “romance” eventually dissipates - yet somehow grows into something indescribably “higher”, a friendship so deep and intimate that words yet again fail to decribe.

Let us celebrate the fact that - when we love - we have eternally become part of the most powerful emotional and spiritual force known to humanity. Love is much too omnipotent and divine for us to ever “lose” at it (even when, and maybe especially when, it seems to us that we surely have).

Indeed, love is such a many splendored and miraculous thing that we should feel eternally blessed and grateful that we’ve ever known it - even when our hearts appear to have been broken; whether by the abandonment of a partner, the death of a beloved pet, or the betrayal of a trusted friend.

We should never be afraid to love. Love can be life’s deepest pain, true, but it is also life’s highest joy. When we love (again, in any of love’s endless forms and flavors) is when we feel our most alive … doing exactly what we were made to do.

Love … is who we are.