I am a patient man because I will wait patiently for something worth waiting for (for something for which to wait -- oh screw the ending in a preposition thing). However, I'm growing rather tired of putting up with time's shit. What do I mean? Well, at the risk of sounding like an absurdist or going off on some nihilistic rant, I don't like the fact that time just goes forward while pushing me along with it. I am reluctant to let go of the past. One of my best friends says I have a problem with the past -- that in some ways I live in the past.
After sorting through a bunch of internal issues, I could only conclude that I am temporally (not temporarily) insecure. Part of this stems from having a very strong memory. I can go back in time easily in my head and relive past emotions, past loves and past experiences that brought me happiness with ease. I can remember the sensations of touch, scents and, with perfect clarity, can recall the sights and sounds of moments that filled me with intense happiness.
It would be foolhardy to believe that life was meant to only be a series of moments that were extremely special. Part of what makes a moment special is the uniqueness of that moment compared with the ordinaryness of every other moment. It is the old cliche "in order to fully understand what it means to be hot, one must have once been cold." Now that does not mean that we cannot partially understand the sensation of being hot without suffering from being cold, but the contrast between the two brings a sort of duality of experience into our lives.
I have loved. I have lost. I sat down the other day asking myself over and over, "is having loved and lost better than never having loved at all," really just a bunch of bullshit? So then I thought about it in terms of hot and cold. When one loves another, they are expressing an emotion opposite of hatred. Between these two extremes is the emotion (or arguably the lack thereof) of indifference. Upon meeting someone, we quickly decide whether we will lean towards love or hate -- we seldom remain indifferent towards people.
In that regard, love and hate are balanced perilously on the tip of a needle. When we invite someone into our heart (in terms of a relationship), we open ourselves up to a lot of possible damage. We take these risks through a leap of faith that the rewards will outweigh them. Opening one's heart is a one-way road. Once opened, the Rubicon is crossed while Ceaser marches proudly towards Rome.
So then I thought about the scope of the question. Losing a love recently served as a catalyst for all this thinking. I got mad at time. I got mad at love. I ran out in a rainstorm with a tall metal rod and screamed at God to bring it on. That's what love can do to a man. Anyhow, the question -- is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?
Well, let's look at it from the perspective of time-flow that goes forward (the one we are used to). You meet someone, you fall in love, you make the conscious decision to open your heart, you share happy memories, the shit hits the fan and then you find yourself sitting on a bench in the rain crying your eyes out wondering just what in the hell went wrong. Days go by and you are still feeling the doom and gloom of a lost love. Weeks go by and you feel the after-effects of a broken heart. Months go by and you collect yourself and move on, but you find yourself occasionally thinking about your previous lover. Years go by and all you have is an occasional reminder that sparks a memory and then a quick, "what if," enters the mind and life goes on. However, you are NEVER the same person you were before meeting them.
Now, let's get mad at time. It is time's fault, right? Because at some point in time, he or she loved you and at some point you loved them. There was that magical point where you both loved each other at the same time. That's the special moment that we cherish -- that creeps into our minds when we least expect it. Even though the relationship failed and he or she went on to marry someone else, we carry these memories of what could have been and that seems to satisfy us enough to keep us somewhat happy.
The problem with having a good memory, though, is that sometimes those beautiful moments are very hard to let go. We associate the moment with the person (as we should, since they shared it with us). If we could suddenly flip the lever and send time going backwards, we'd suddenly notice something odd. Buildings springing up instantly while others are slowly disassembled (basically the exact opposite of how things occur in a time-forward viewpoint). We slowly start falling back in love with that special person. Pain slips into confusion while confusion slips back into solid love. Things are great again! Things are exactly as they once were. We are back in those special moments. Hold on, though -- because time isn't stopping! Suddenly we feel the love quickly fade and then suddenly we can't even remember who we were just hugging. All memories of that person are completely erased from existence.
So, going backward in time really solves nothing, because now we're at a greater disadvantage -- we can't even remember the people we had relationships with. So ultimately the solution must be to find a special moment that we treasure and stop time and live in that moment forever. Well, if time really is frozen, how can we really feel anything? How do we grow as a person? We can't grow -- we can't even ungrow -- we just stick. Alright, so freezing time was stupid -- how about we just keep replaying a special moment over and over like an old 8-track. We go through it once and then twice and we are amoured by that special person. Three, four, five and then six times. Sooner or later we suddenly realize that we've run the moment into the ground. I call this the "hot tub" syndrome. Getting into a hot tub feels great for the first minute, but once our body adjusts to the water, it isn't quite as pleasurable. We can't make the water any hotter because we're already at our threshold, so we just have to enjoy the sensation while it lasts because it shortly dies. If you sit in a tub long enough, the water get warm and then cool. Then you step out and start shivering -- hot and cold, love and hate, time running backwards and forwards.
We can't play just one moment that is special over and over, we have to keep finding new moments -- we have to diversify. However, in order for this to happen, there must be some flow of time. We've already determined that a failed relationship is doomed on both ends of time, and moving backwards gives us moments we can cherish yet never remember. The only solution would be for time to move forward -- so that we can both cherish and remember those moments. The echo of that love carries forward in time throughout the rest of our lives. Sure, we will love others, but all of these moments, experiences and echoes eventually make us realize something even greater.
It isn't necessarily loving another that we were only after -- it was learning to love ourselves. To forgive ourselves of the mistakes we made with past lovers -- to forgive them for theirs. It is that marching of time going forward that lends us the opportunity to mend a broken-heart and learn to love again no matter how much pain we experience from a freshly broken one.
Idealistically, I want to say that loving and losing is always better than never having loved at all -- because even if we fail to cultivate the relationship, we have succeeded in learning something greater about ourselves. Ideally, we would recognize those special moments in time when they first started to occur and heighten our awareness of our environment. We would relish the fact that we exist while walking around touching things and staring at different things while thinking, "I am now beginning a special moment, I want to take in as much of this as possible and cement this memory in my heart."
Only then can we move forward and grow as a person when we feel that love continues to fail us. Only then can we learn that love isn't a win or lose proposition, but an eternal learning experience that puts us more in touch with ourselves.
Tuesday, October 23
Thursday, October 18
Underneath a Trillion Stars
There I was sitting atop a hill that overlooks a large city glowing brightly in the night. From the vast distance, the hustle of bodies in the night faded into static. The city, from afar, becomes a vast landscape of tall buildings that hold hundreds of thousands of people.
Each small window holds a story. Behind one, a couple are making love. Behind another, an old man lives alone reading his book before retiring for the night. Yet in another, two lovers meet for the first time while in another window two lovers meet for the last.
As I sat, I closed my eyes while a cool wind crept over my body. I listened but couldn't hear traffic and the blowing of horns -- I was far away from that. A million things were taking place in that city, but with my eyes closed I envisioned a hundred other cities, each with a million different windows that held their own stories.
With my eyes still closed, I wondered what it would be like to be able to hear a billion people all at once. Every conversation that took place across half of the Earth -- would it sound like static? After astounding myself with the thought of how much diversity was present across the world, I then looked up at a trillion stars. How many other Earths were out there? How many windows were there in total throughout the universe?
And then a curious thing happened when I opened my eyes. I saw a rabbit sitting not too far away from me. The rabbit just sat there facing the city. There I was -- alone with a white rabbit on a large hill overlooking an even larger city. What could that rabbit possibly be thinking?
"What in the hell is that man doing just sitting there away from all the other people? What is that man thinking? How many other rabbits are in my forest? How many rabbits are there out there in the universe? Where's my carrot?"
As I sat, I felt a vibration begin in the bottom of my spine and spread out through my body. It caused me to shiver from its energy. I knew that feeling all too well -- it is the feeling of god within my heart giving me a glimpse of infinity. There I sat with my feeble little mind trying to contemplate things that only a god could take in totality.
The rabbit ran off into the woods.
The city grew brighter as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
"Where did that rabbit run off to," I asked myself.
He ran off into the night. That's when I lied down on that large hill and fell asleep.
That night I dreamt of rabbits, windows, planets, stars and most of all, I dreamt of a love deeper than any love I had felt before.
Each small window holds a story. Behind one, a couple are making love. Behind another, an old man lives alone reading his book before retiring for the night. Yet in another, two lovers meet for the first time while in another window two lovers meet for the last.
As I sat, I closed my eyes while a cool wind crept over my body. I listened but couldn't hear traffic and the blowing of horns -- I was far away from that. A million things were taking place in that city, but with my eyes closed I envisioned a hundred other cities, each with a million different windows that held their own stories.
With my eyes still closed, I wondered what it would be like to be able to hear a billion people all at once. Every conversation that took place across half of the Earth -- would it sound like static? After astounding myself with the thought of how much diversity was present across the world, I then looked up at a trillion stars. How many other Earths were out there? How many windows were there in total throughout the universe?
And then a curious thing happened when I opened my eyes. I saw a rabbit sitting not too far away from me. The rabbit just sat there facing the city. There I was -- alone with a white rabbit on a large hill overlooking an even larger city. What could that rabbit possibly be thinking?
"What in the hell is that man doing just sitting there away from all the other people? What is that man thinking? How many other rabbits are in my forest? How many rabbits are there out there in the universe? Where's my carrot?"
As I sat, I felt a vibration begin in the bottom of my spine and spread out through my body. It caused me to shiver from its energy. I knew that feeling all too well -- it is the feeling of god within my heart giving me a glimpse of infinity. There I sat with my feeble little mind trying to contemplate things that only a god could take in totality.
The rabbit ran off into the woods.
The city grew brighter as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
"Where did that rabbit run off to," I asked myself.
He ran off into the night. That's when I lied down on that large hill and fell asleep.
That night I dreamt of rabbits, windows, planets, stars and most of all, I dreamt of a love deeper than any love I had felt before.
Saturday, October 13
Inside an old heart
"Did you love her?"
Yes.
"What was it about her that you loved?"
I don't know. It was a "feeling." Not a feeling I get easily. Not a feeling I feel from many women. Yet, when I feel it, I know it and I knew I loved her deeply.
"And this was years ago?"
Yes. Years. A dozen months or hundreds of days. Time doesn't seem to matter when one talks about love. Love stands outside of time. It just sits there patiently in your heart either waiting for you to take action or waiting for you to invoke memories of your inactions. It sits quietly at the seat of your soul.
"So when you think of her today, how does it make you feel inside?"
I feel that love. I can remember the feelings it invoked inside of me. I can remember the first time we held hands -- the first time we kissed. I can remember how that love felt -- the mystery of what would happen next wrapped within the memories of what we shared that previous day. Love had a way of fucking with time -- one hour with her would seem like only a second, yet just minutes of waiting to see her would feel like days of torment. That's how love can fuck with time. When you are at your happiest and with her, it goes all too quickly. Yet when you are apart and waiting to see her next, it feels like an eternity stretched even further.
"Perhaps that is one way to immortality?"
Yes, exactly. Find a way to leave yourself waiting for her forever and time will come to a complete halt. You will, in essence, have found the secret to immortality.
"And when she never comes?"
That's the thing. That's how time seeks revenge for love fucking with it. That's how time then fucks with love. When she's no longer there -- or when she no longer loves you but you still care and love her ... that's time's way of fucking with you eternally. Unrequited love is sickening. It leaves a man forever naked in the depths of his most precious passions. It leaves him crying on the inside while society forces his to posture himself in a stoic fashion on the outside. Yet, all the while, he is thinking of her and missing her.
"Well, they say it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all."
Yes, but on the opposite side of that expression is something far more distressing. It is worse for her to have loved you at one point and then ceased loving you than for her to never have loved you at all.
"What do you mean?"
If she had never loved him, then it would be far easier to reconcile the old memories of wanting her -- of needing to be with her. But much scarier still is the possession of memories of when she did love you and when she did care about you only to face the present and find yourself in a time where she no longer thinks or cares about you. Then you find yourself living in the past and that's a dangerous thing to do.
"You should never live in the past. There is always a tomorrow -- a future."
Yeah, but on a more philisophical level, everything comes to past. Everyone at some point will find themselves on their death bed reliving the most important ... the most precious parts of their lives and wondering what it all meant. The first time they were left alone from their parents. I remember that. I remember nursery school and my mom letting go of my hand and walking away. My entire life, I was near my mother and she would come to me if I cried. Yet that day, I remember quite vividly -- she took me to my first day of school and let go of my hand and said, "I'll see you in a few hours, honey!"
I didn't believe her. I was too young to understand. To a kid, once someone you love leaves your field of view, they're as good as gone. So there I was -- alone. I was alone with a bunch of strangers and this strange adult came up to me. His name was Mr. Leo and I didn't know who this guy was. He held my hand and tried to convince me that I would be alright -- but I cried. I screamed out, "MOMMY!" I didn't want to be left alone. I was scared and felt abandoned. Once my mom crossed the threshold of the doorway and I could no longer see her, I became hysterical. Mr. Leo took me over to a large fishtank and I watched fish swimming while crying my eyes out for over an hour.
"What does this have to do with love?"
Because man, when you love a woman, there is that sense of baring it all to her. You invite her into your life and at some point, you stop being a cocky prick type of guy and you expose your true emotions to her. You show her everything and bare it all and if she decides to stick around -- that's true love. That's the most beautiful thing on Earth -- to be able to find someone out there who will find shit stains on your underwear and not get grossed out about it -- metaphorically speaking of course. Someone who accepts you for who you are and chooses to be with you because they love YOU and not some image of a guy they think they'd want to love. That's beautiful.
"And if they leave?"
I felt like that day when I was three years old and my mom had left me. I felt abandoned, alone and scared. Breaking up is an extremely hard thing to do because it is like losing a piece of your family and a piece of your heart. It's one thing when you go up to a female and ask her out and she says no. That's not really personal -- that's rejection, but it doesn't really hurt. But to give your life, heart and soul to a woman and for her to know your deepest fears and silliest habits and then one day she leaves? That's personal -- that hurts. It's like being three again and watching my mom leave thinking she'll never come back.
"Yeah, but there is always future possibilities -- new loves, new people, new adventures."
Exactly. But at some point you realize you're giving a piece of your heart and soul to every woman that comes into your life. How many pieces total can I give out? Then you have to realize that it becomes a little bit harder to bare it all with the next woman because you know the pain of breaking-up and how much it stings -- it really fucking stings. Your heart learns to be a bit more defensive with each new love -- yet that's fucking stupid because you never know at what point you will meet the woman who will be with you your entire life.
"You can't give up on love ever."
No, you can't. But at the same time, the older you get the more memories you have of women who did mean something to you at some point in your life. And no matter what happens, there is always a piece of you that is thinking of them and a piece of you that still loves them -- or at least loves some earlier memory of them. The heart gets filled up with all these memories of experiences you had with them. There are some memories that are too precious to put into words. Each lover has that one memory that you'll always cherish. It is carved in stone for eternity -- or at least until you die. But there it is, locked deep inside your heart occasionally surfacing when you read a particular story or smell a certain scent.
Love never really dies. People come and go within relationships but that love they share? It never really dies. Love is a lot like water. You can't destory water. You can seperate it -- but there is always an ocean of it out there somewhere waiting for you to dive in and experience more. You'll swim and swim and love it but at some point you have to come out of the pool on a cold day and you're left shaking from the cold -- you know you love to swim, but you realize at some point you'll have to leave the pool and then you'll start shaking. What's the best cure to end the coldness -- to end the shaking? To jump back in the pool -- to stay in the pool forever and never leave it.
That's what love is all about. Finding someone to swim with forever.
Yes.
"What was it about her that you loved?"
I don't know. It was a "feeling." Not a feeling I get easily. Not a feeling I feel from many women. Yet, when I feel it, I know it and I knew I loved her deeply.
"And this was years ago?"
Yes. Years. A dozen months or hundreds of days. Time doesn't seem to matter when one talks about love. Love stands outside of time. It just sits there patiently in your heart either waiting for you to take action or waiting for you to invoke memories of your inactions. It sits quietly at the seat of your soul.
"So when you think of her today, how does it make you feel inside?"
I feel that love. I can remember the feelings it invoked inside of me. I can remember the first time we held hands -- the first time we kissed. I can remember how that love felt -- the mystery of what would happen next wrapped within the memories of what we shared that previous day. Love had a way of fucking with time -- one hour with her would seem like only a second, yet just minutes of waiting to see her would feel like days of torment. That's how love can fuck with time. When you are at your happiest and with her, it goes all too quickly. Yet when you are apart and waiting to see her next, it feels like an eternity stretched even further.
"Perhaps that is one way to immortality?"
Yes, exactly. Find a way to leave yourself waiting for her forever and time will come to a complete halt. You will, in essence, have found the secret to immortality.
"And when she never comes?"
That's the thing. That's how time seeks revenge for love fucking with it. That's how time then fucks with love. When she's no longer there -- or when she no longer loves you but you still care and love her ... that's time's way of fucking with you eternally. Unrequited love is sickening. It leaves a man forever naked in the depths of his most precious passions. It leaves him crying on the inside while society forces his to posture himself in a stoic fashion on the outside. Yet, all the while, he is thinking of her and missing her.
"Well, they say it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all."
Yes, but on the opposite side of that expression is something far more distressing. It is worse for her to have loved you at one point and then ceased loving you than for her to never have loved you at all.
"What do you mean?"
If she had never loved him, then it would be far easier to reconcile the old memories of wanting her -- of needing to be with her. But much scarier still is the possession of memories of when she did love you and when she did care about you only to face the present and find yourself in a time where she no longer thinks or cares about you. Then you find yourself living in the past and that's a dangerous thing to do.
"You should never live in the past. There is always a tomorrow -- a future."
Yeah, but on a more philisophical level, everything comes to past. Everyone at some point will find themselves on their death bed reliving the most important ... the most precious parts of their lives and wondering what it all meant. The first time they were left alone from their parents. I remember that. I remember nursery school and my mom letting go of my hand and walking away. My entire life, I was near my mother and she would come to me if I cried. Yet that day, I remember quite vividly -- she took me to my first day of school and let go of my hand and said, "I'll see you in a few hours, honey!"
I didn't believe her. I was too young to understand. To a kid, once someone you love leaves your field of view, they're as good as gone. So there I was -- alone. I was alone with a bunch of strangers and this strange adult came up to me. His name was Mr. Leo and I didn't know who this guy was. He held my hand and tried to convince me that I would be alright -- but I cried. I screamed out, "MOMMY!" I didn't want to be left alone. I was scared and felt abandoned. Once my mom crossed the threshold of the doorway and I could no longer see her, I became hysterical. Mr. Leo took me over to a large fishtank and I watched fish swimming while crying my eyes out for over an hour.
"What does this have to do with love?"
Because man, when you love a woman, there is that sense of baring it all to her. You invite her into your life and at some point, you stop being a cocky prick type of guy and you expose your true emotions to her. You show her everything and bare it all and if she decides to stick around -- that's true love. That's the most beautiful thing on Earth -- to be able to find someone out there who will find shit stains on your underwear and not get grossed out about it -- metaphorically speaking of course. Someone who accepts you for who you are and chooses to be with you because they love YOU and not some image of a guy they think they'd want to love. That's beautiful.
"And if they leave?"
I felt like that day when I was three years old and my mom had left me. I felt abandoned, alone and scared. Breaking up is an extremely hard thing to do because it is like losing a piece of your family and a piece of your heart. It's one thing when you go up to a female and ask her out and she says no. That's not really personal -- that's rejection, but it doesn't really hurt. But to give your life, heart and soul to a woman and for her to know your deepest fears and silliest habits and then one day she leaves? That's personal -- that hurts. It's like being three again and watching my mom leave thinking she'll never come back.
"Yeah, but there is always future possibilities -- new loves, new people, new adventures."
Exactly. But at some point you realize you're giving a piece of your heart and soul to every woman that comes into your life. How many pieces total can I give out? Then you have to realize that it becomes a little bit harder to bare it all with the next woman because you know the pain of breaking-up and how much it stings -- it really fucking stings. Your heart learns to be a bit more defensive with each new love -- yet that's fucking stupid because you never know at what point you will meet the woman who will be with you your entire life.
"You can't give up on love ever."
No, you can't. But at the same time, the older you get the more memories you have of women who did mean something to you at some point in your life. And no matter what happens, there is always a piece of you that is thinking of them and a piece of you that still loves them -- or at least loves some earlier memory of them. The heart gets filled up with all these memories of experiences you had with them. There are some memories that are too precious to put into words. Each lover has that one memory that you'll always cherish. It is carved in stone for eternity -- or at least until you die. But there it is, locked deep inside your heart occasionally surfacing when you read a particular story or smell a certain scent.
Love never really dies. People come and go within relationships but that love they share? It never really dies. Love is a lot like water. You can't destory water. You can seperate it -- but there is always an ocean of it out there somewhere waiting for you to dive in and experience more. You'll swim and swim and love it but at some point you have to come out of the pool on a cold day and you're left shaking from the cold -- you know you love to swim, but you realize at some point you'll have to leave the pool and then you'll start shaking. What's the best cure to end the coldness -- to end the shaking? To jump back in the pool -- to stay in the pool forever and never leave it.
That's what love is all about. Finding someone to swim with forever.
Thursday, October 4
Poem
Between the old oak tree and large grey rock,
Through trodden fields that glistened with spring's dew,
there is a place within my weathered soul,
of old memories being close to you.
As the sun melted yellow down the sky,
Between old branches gentle soft winds blew,
and there you sat close to me through the night
heads resting together as darkness grew.
Deep in your eyes was a place of refuge,
Deeper was your soul that would go to any length,
To the depths of your heart to give me strength,
A realization of love that softly sang.
Despite years creeping into tomorrow,
The future springs wept cold rains of sorrow,
As a divide grew between our two souls,
That left shattered emotions full of holes.
I traveled to that place where the hill dips,
my eyes shut, I can feel the brush of your lips,
The air, silent, blows a kiss across my face
as memories of you cause my heart to race.
My eyes open as night has befallen day,
As I sit there longing for some way to say,
I miss your breath and passion and all the while,
I'd walk these fields again for a thousand miles.
Through trodden fields that glistened with spring's dew,
there is a place within my weathered soul,
of old memories being close to you.
As the sun melted yellow down the sky,
Between old branches gentle soft winds blew,
and there you sat close to me through the night
heads resting together as darkness grew.
Deep in your eyes was a place of refuge,
Deeper was your soul that would go to any length,
To the depths of your heart to give me strength,
A realization of love that softly sang.
Despite years creeping into tomorrow,
The future springs wept cold rains of sorrow,
As a divide grew between our two souls,
That left shattered emotions full of holes.
I traveled to that place where the hill dips,
my eyes shut, I can feel the brush of your lips,
The air, silent, blows a kiss across my face
as memories of you cause my heart to race.
My eyes open as night has befallen day,
As I sit there longing for some way to say,
I miss your breath and passion and all the while,
I'd walk these fields again for a thousand miles.
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