Of life  and love

Love- is perhaps one of the most sought after, most misunderstood and most polluted word in the English dictionary after God. Humanity's craze with love far extends all of time and landscapes. I went through all the stages of this and by grace, I was blessed that my entity allowed me to touch the crest of what I would undoubtedly call as love. One of the movies that did leave a lasting mark on me after The Matrix, is Interstellar. If one notices attentively, the entire movie is brilliantly and artistically crafted out of two concepts- Gravity, without which the existence is impossible and Love, without which biological existence is impossible- making it one of the deepest philosophical movies I went through. Intellectuals often try to be content with their very limited idea of rationality but there is enough of rational evidence to the fact that there are too many phenomena which are beyond any scope of explanation and aptly enough, every phenomenon doesn't owe an explanation. If you intellectually try to ask yourself, "Why is she beautiful?", the way you perceived beauty when you found her beautiful, will fade off. While intellect is good in it's own endeavor, but without emotions, it becomes lame. Human beings have achieved the impossible in moments of total love, and history proves the fact. Emotions isn't contradictory to intelligence but in my opinion, it is complimentary and presence of emotions is as necessary as intelligence is.

I am from a typical conservative family. So you can say that I have had absolutely no exposure to something called love or whatsoever. It wasn't my pursuit either, and I didn't pay any heed to the same. From childhood, one thing I knew for certain- that I am unaffected by so many circumstances that people around me seem to react to in bizzare ways. I was an observer to myself, what I did, what I thought, how I behaved, I shaped all of them slowly myself. What you might be seeing as my personality today, isn't a product of society, but something of which every inch I crafted. I was much more impressed by crematoriums than beautiful houses, and therefore I was not quite a candidate for being an ideal family man. Now, as an explorer, I personally find much more solace and fulfiment in crematoriums than in deluxe complexes. It is not that I didn't try to fit myself here, I did, after nature started the hormonal flux post adolescence, I had tried to build some handful of relationships with women, but fortunately, all of them failed after sometime, quite terribly! That's where I realized that I was thoroughly fooling myself with these petty stuffs when such a broad horizon is there waiting to be tapped.

Have I ever been in love in relationships? Well, after the richest of what I have experienced, it wasn't love that I felt anywhere being in conditioned relationships. All those feelings that I misunderstood as love was simply nature's programmed response to human biological needs. Yes, I did genuinely care for all the women I mistook as "mine", and I did my best in those teenage days and I am satisfied for that. It's not that I did injustice to any of my relationships as per my understanding back then. What I learned very quickly being in relationships was social and human resource management, and I won't disagree to the fact that every relationships I have been in contributed to my social maturity- in which I was completely null and void.

It wasn't a very special day to start with. Nothing very superficial, nothing great- just an usual day. I came across a woman. And just by mere talking to her for an hour, something inside me burst open. Something that I had never felt till then. As the feeling grew deeper, I realized more and more that it is not related to anyone, it's just in me. Because I was thoroughly a boy of intellect, I couldn't understand a bit of what was happening inside, but whatever was happening, was wonderful and I didn't want to stop it. Loads of strong yet subtle feelings flowed from every point of my body. The feeling was wonderfully liberating- you just need nothing. Time flows by and you're simply there, just like that. You're at your best of everything and this impression falls on everyone around you. I remember, for 7 long days, I was just living every moment. Every book about love, a handful of philosophies, everything went into trash in a moment. I got to know very clearly what is not love. It was not towards anyone specific, and anything I did, I sang, I wrote, I painted, in love, added so much more glaze to what I did. I totally embraced that experience and somehow it left me transformed, and till date I am grateful to be capable of that experience. It shattered quite some hard shells of my persona and directed me towards a way towards fulfilled life. There was no reason, no purpose, no timing for love to exist. 

Jotting down the entire experience in a single sentence- Love is when your emotions work at the highest level, you don't exist in a way, you are throbbing with the juice of life, whatever you do, touch, say, the way you're makes a totally different impact of the same. You can share this expression with anyone and anything. It is not about someone but something, you can't discriminate even the animate and inanimate! The vibe of the atmosphere becomes very lively. This IS, what I understand, as love. So why didn't it happen before, not even in relationships where I had shared my entire body and mind with the other half? The answer is simple- deep-built prejudices, around how love should be a give and take strategy, quantifying love like potatoes in a vegetable market, and a very polluted notion of the same which doesn't allow our hearts to open, to be free, to be vulnerable. I had been a prey to the false notions, and not only did it not block me from being free to love, but also made everything toxic around, even when I didn't want it to be. 

Love is when you're the sunrise and the sunset, and every moment in between, love is when you need nobody to be absolutely yourself, love is when you look at anything and instantly it becomes yours. Love is when you make someone feel a tinge of the same, love is when you don't exist even being totally alone in the universe with billions of other people. Love is that tenderness, that realm, where you become totally giving, you totally surrender yourself. Whether to hold someone to look upto it, or to be completely alone makes no difference. Love is, when you experience permanence of the self which is rooted into everything dynamic and temporary. Discovering yourself, o friend, is love!

May you be in love, may you taste the perennially flowing juice of life.....!

Epilogue: 

"Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place."

–Zora Neale Hurston