Ignition.
Love is always the most difficult category for me to write about because there truly is no universal lens that everyone sees love out of.
Everyone’s experience of it is different to the other. This mystery doesn’t just breed a difficulty in understanding the concept of it…but makes us almost uncertain about our own experience of it.
How do we truly know that what we’re experiencing is this notorious "love" thing when there are no specifications as to what the experience should entail? How do we tick the boxes as we go along?
Brene Brown expresses love as something that should be nurtured rather than something given or gotten.
Built like a house rather than the temporary satisfaction of buying yet another outfit.
I guess what makes people see love as a transaction rather than something to be developed is the initial intense attraction that drives us towards the person that we care for.
The urge to greedily absorb more of this foreign feeling that they radiate to fill us up, as we try to emerge from a place of scarcity.
Then what does all of this imply about those "love at first sight" experiences? Those moments that occur in a split second, you meet someone and believe that you both might just fit like a glove?
Or the moment you stare into the eyes of the person you connect with and experience raw energy…a magnetic pull, all your senses shut down and all I can see is you…
How can you convince that person that what they are feeling is not love?
Or maybe what we fail to understand is...
Just like a matchstick
You strike it
It ignites
It slowly burns…
So do the foremost experiences, feelings and connections that lead to love simply ignite.
Ignite interest
To know more
To experience things
To see what the other’s life is like
To try to understand the world out of their own eyes
Maybe that ignition is what makes us rush into believing that some things may be greater than what they truly are.
Or it could be these same feelings that drive us towards what we have needed all our lives, what we wished to the universe for, what complements our world?
Which ever way it may be, the doorway into love is ridden with objects of the past and subjects of the future.
Fear.
Lust.
Anxiety.
Empathy.
Doubt.
Hope.
Hope that whatever whirlwind comes our way, we will be strong enough to take it.
Faith that although the past promised and failed, maybe this time it truly will be different.
Doubtful vigilance in awareness of the reality that nothing in life is a fairytale.
Assurance that whatever sequence of events we encounter, this experience is real to us.
Knowledge that love itself is ambiguity.
One day, we should hope for the confidence to recognise and admit to ourselves that yes, in our lives, in our existence, we love, have been loved and will always be loved...by someone.