On Love — that quintessential feeling that makes life worth living
“ It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.”, or, “If you love something set it free, if it comes back to you it is yours, if it doesn’t it was never meant to be.” We have all heard these and more as we were growing up.
We have all experienced love in many different ways. Parental love welcomed us into this world. Although I was told by my parents that I was not breathing when I announced my appearance. They had to hold me upside down and smack me till I started to howl. Parental love is a form of unconditional love that we all universally experience. Or at least a majority of us that are fortunate. For most, this is an unconditional love that lasts a life time, our only relationship that accepts our frailties and almost always forgives our mistakes. It’s one of those unequal relationships where energy flows in abundance in one direction and doesn’t necessarily in the other. It’s nature’s way some would say as that abundant affection that flows from parent to offspring is replicated across generations. It’s usually not until later in life when our parents become grand parents that we begin to realize the depth of that affection through our own exposures to this parental sentiment.
As we age from being infants to toddlers through teenage and finally adulthood we somehow transform from being loved to those craving for love. For by the time we reach adulthood we come to realize how unkind this world we inhabit really is. We are just a mere mortal and except for our parents our lives seem to not matter to the rest of the world. It’s not that others don’t acknowledge our existence, but there are very few lives we touch and even to those our life is just a fragrance a memory which may or may not linger for ever. It’s during this time of our life that we start craving for attention and affection. Instead of looking within ourselves and realizing who we are we start looking externally to define who we are. Our siblings, friends and relatives (grand parents, uncles , aunts, cousins) start to give more meaning to our lives. Some of these relationships blossom into lifelong caring relationships — grandparently, avuncular or a brotherly or sisterly love you can say. These are good trustworthy advisory roles that we rely on during our life’s journey. These are strong bonds that a few of us are fortunate to have but even these don’t fulfill our inner souls desire for unconditional love. For as we approach adulthood even mundane disagreements which in our childhood we probably would have forgotten in a moment, linger on and damage these bonds. These tend not to be a good replacements for the unconditional affection that we got from our parents, which despite the passage of time continues unabated.
Realizing that the grandfatherly, avuncular and filial affection is not enough we continue to seek that role of a life companion who will accept us for who we are. Strangely in this quest for our perfect match we often forget we too need to be that better half for our companion. By chance, we stumble into a relationship seeking the unconditional love that we seek or stay unattached and unfulfilled for eternity. Little do we realize that neither actually fulfills what we are seeking. We humans by nature are selfish and our quest for love is too externally focused. We expect others to be affectionate to us and give too much importance to how others behave towards us and shower affection upon us. This quest for love that starts when we enter our teens, lasts through our adult life. Those who find a life partner to care for them realize theirs is not a perfect relationship and often unbalanced. Even in long sustained relationships the acceptance of the other person as who they are seldom happens. This unfulfilled quest for unconditional love remains for the large part unfulfilled. Those that stayed unattached continue to crave for attachment and envy the closeness of those that are attached. It’s only in very rare instances they each realize that the only way to fulfill their wishes is to look within. If only we each realize that we each are similar, selfish humans and we each crave for the same thing we maybe able to cross the threshold and realize the futility of our search. It’s only when we learn to love others as ourselves we can reach a state of blissful coexistence. Our quest can only end when we realize the futility of it.
Then there is the love for our children. For those couples that bear their own children or adopt this becomes the most significant relationship of their life. This is perhaps the only natural unconditional love that we will experience in our life time. Just like the parental love we experienced, we provide our children with unconditional love that is unsurpassed. It’s the only time in our life we start accepting wholeheartedly a human ( our children ) for who they are. We each genuinely care for their well being and provide for their safety, nourishment and prepare them for their life’s journey. It is that one quintessential love that we experience. It’s only at this time of our life we start to realize the love that our parents showered on us. We took things for granted but never could reciprocate the affection they showered upon us in kind. That’s the cycle of life and we too will experience the same when our kids age.
