On love

My capacity for love is boundless. Love is not a finite resource.

I think many people view love as black and white. You love someone or you don’t. You did, but you don’t anymore.

“I want to believe that you either love someone, in some way, forever, or you never really loved them at all. That once two reactive chemicals cross, both are changed.” – Brianna Wiest

I think love it more like energy. In physics, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system (in this case, read as “soul”) remains constant. This law means that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed from one form to another. Love can change, but it is always love…or it was never actually love at all. We have all made that mistake in our moments of lesser self-awareness.

I believe in soulmates, but not solely in the context of romantic love. A soulmate is someone whose inner being, who they are at the very center of their soul, speaks unequivocally to your own. They’re rare, because we are each such shattered vessels, welded back together time and time again.

Kintsugi: The art of precious scars

“In Japan, when a piece of pottery breaks, some potters fill the cracks with gold. The potters, they see the repairs as something beautiful. They know that the unexpected happens. Change happens. They know that nobody gets through this world in one piece. That doesn’t have to diminish us. The cracks are part of our history, they will always be with us. They made us better, they made us stronger, they made us something new.” – Meredith Grey Season 14, Episode 24

 

“This woman that you are today, 

You became her by breaking

Over and over and over again.

Allow no one to take that away from you.

You are valuable. You are precious.

Because you built yourself from shards.

You broke to become.”

-Nikita Gill

 

Finding someone whose jagged edges match up with your own is not something that happens every day. But when you meet them in passing, there is a quiet recognition of one soul glimpsing its counterpart in the other and breathing a sigh of relief. “Oh…hello, you” it whispers with a soft smile, remembering the peace of human connection in a space that does not need words to feel understood.

“We all start as strangers. The choices we make in terms of love are usually ones that seem inevitable anyway. We find people irrationally compelling. We find souls made of the same stuff ours are.” -Brianna Wiest

If we are very lucky…perhaps luck is the wrong word. If we are conscious enough about our choices and our actions, self-aware enough, patient enough to listen to the tiny voice inside that says “wait, wait, wait until…,” maybe the person we commit to in life is also one of our soulmates.

We are not, any of us, helpless with love unless we choose to be so, regardless of how inevitable our choices seem. I don’t think you can choose who you love but I am not a romantic… We can choose what we do with the love that grows like wildflowers inside of us. I think those that believe you can love one person, and only one person, at a time…hell, in your whole life….are limiting themselves. They are closing themselves off from human experiences and connections, robbing themselves and others of part of the beauty in life. If you believe in committed, monogamous relationships, which I do, you can choose to acknowledge that love, treasure it for the rare experience it is, and allow it to remain uncultivated.

I imagine marriage or any committed relationship as a cultivated garden, with neat orderly rows; all the hard work and care evident in its meticulousness. That can be love. So can the random wildflowers that grow unbidden in its midst. You can yank them out as intruders in your carefully tended garden. If you are careful and conscious, you can leave them and admire how their wild beauty adds to the whole array of colors in your garden. Some people never choose commitment, reveling in a riotous field of wildflowers.

No one should feel helpless in the face of love. Even in love, we are infinitely powerful over our choices. We can choose how we love. We can choose to let those we love hurt us. We can choose to leave. Just because a choice seems unimaginable in a given moment, does not mean that it is not ours to make.