If you see him, you wouldn’t believe he is love. I don’t mean he was named “Love”. By Love I mean that he was the feeling of love —the one you get when you look into the eyes of a lover, the emotion that overwhelms when you look at your newborn child, or a warm fuzzy feeling that takes over in the exact moment you realize how much your parents have sacrificed to raise you. Love was an embodiment of all such feelings and more, the only difference was that he was trapped in mortal flesh and bones — a human form that limited his immortal, expansive true self.
Love’s parents were raised in a world where people were taught to recognize the beauty of materialistic things — where to survive and be accepted in the society one had to have respectable things, such as a respectable name. So, when Love was born he was given one of the many unoriginal names that can only help differentiate a person via their surname. If you ask Love about his name now, he’d laugh and say, “Yeah, I think I was called Timmy…or was it Rajesh?” Ever since he realized what he was in actuality, he transcended into permanent ecstasy. But, the journey of self-realization hadn’t been an easy one for him — it’s the toughest thing that he had to do, but the rewards, as Love can tell you now, are unmatched.
Like every child initiated into this world, Love identified with the name, religion, and country he was given. He was taught about wrong and right, morality, laws, rules, “right” behavior, and patterns that would help him survive in the world. Conforming to these patterns was hard for him and his parents noticed something odd about him. When giving the little boy training about not talking to strangers or accepting candy from them, the child would always smile at strangers, break the candy into two pieces and share the other half with them. The boy would always look at people with love in his eyes — how could he not? He was Love, and love is trusting and kind. Some would say naïve too. This oddity greatly worried his parents even as they tried their best to make Love “smart” in the worldly sense. But, these methods never worked for a child who was in tune with his true nature.
Up until middle school, Love was as happy as one could be. If other kids made fun of him, he didn’t let it get him down — instead, as a reaction, he would become even more kind and loving. His intrinsic nature was to forgive because love doesn’t hold grudges. Love always forgives.
If you ask Love when was the first time he forgot himself was, he’ll take a full minute to remember and say “I think around high school.” Things started to change for Love when he entered his teens. As everyone will attest, high school is a necessary, but challenging part of a person’s growth — one starts learning behaviors that help them survive, not necessarily live, in the real world, there’s peer pressure and the need to belong. Love found it hard to adjust to an environment where one is rewarded for following norms that are based on cold, practical logic rather than love. He was often bullied for being soft-spoken and kind. Gradually, Love went into his own, isolated shell — he stopped expressing the very core of what he was made. Moments, where Love would express himself truly or would help others unconditionally, were replaced by moments of solitude and loneliness.
Until he found her.
Don’t get me wrong — Love was love before he found her — he loved everyone, especially before he entered high school. But, he couldn’t resist noticing her roaming on the streets, nervous energy about her, trying to be “woke” and “cool” to fit in. As fate would have it, one day as he saw her crying alone in a dark corner of the school ground. He couldn’t help but get back to his childish faith of trying to make it better because love can’t help but nurture. So, Love went and gave her his ears and became a shoulder to cry on.
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After this they were inseparable. Humans would call this association between two beings as a “couple”. She was what his day began and ended with. And he was her anchor — he poured every drop of his existence, his expansive nature of love into her. When they kissed, it was sheer ecstasy for Love — for those few moments he transcended his human limitations and became one with her.
But, like almost all high school romances, Love’s love story was cut short. Fueled with the confidence of self that Love poured into her, she realized that she didn’t need his presence. She outgrew him, which is a common trait among fast-growing teenagers. However, Love didn’t understand this at the time and the heartbreak took a toll on him. It weaved his spirit closer to flesh and bone until he couldn’t distinguish between his true self and the societal identity he was given. Love finally forgot who he was.
If someone told you what Love did next, you wouldn’t find anything off about it. Love graduated high school, got into a respectable university, and completed his degree. He got a regular job at a regular place, had a regular salary. He ticked all societal boxes of what happiness looks like. But, if you took a deeper look at his life, Love was stuck in a monotonous daily routine of a working-class person. His smile wasn’t to spread love and only spoke when spoken to, not a word more. The joy and love that he spread when he knew who he was now drowning in white-collar shirts and PowerPoint presentations. More than this, Love never let anyone close to him, his walls were too high for anyone to leap over. The walls around his being were created because of fear — fear of letting someone in and them leaving, getting hurt, and non-reciprocation of what he felt. These walls now became such an intrinsic part of this life that he forgot where these walls began and where he ended. His core nature, his spirit lived in confusion and turmoil, while externally he was just “all right”.
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One day, when Love was returning from his workplace, it started to rain — a downpour that seemed like the wrath of heaven itself was upon the world. Love took shelter under a park structure where he saw a few parents with their kids huddled together. He took a corner in this structure, a dead look on his face that was once exuberant with joy. A few years ago Love would have danced in the rain, loving every drop that fell on his body.
He looked a little further down and he saw two small kids, about a few years old, in their raincoats playing with a mud puddle in the park. They laughed and splish-splashed, jumped back and forth in the puddle. At first, Love looked away not really seeing them, engrossed in his misery. But, slowly the laughter of these kids filled his ears, and he couldn’t help but notice them.
And after many years, he was finally able to see.
***
The children in front of him were playing in the muddy pool because it was their nature to do so. They were fully aware that their excited jumps would bring mud on their feet, on their legs, and render them dirty. They knew the raincoats weren’t enough to protect them from a downpour as heavy as this, but it did not stop them from expressing their desire to be one with the mud puddle. Love realized then that it was their core to laugh and play in the mud, and it was mud’s nature to stick. Neither was wrong, but only doing what they were supposed to do, what nature intended them to do. If these children were somehow stopped from playing, it would be like stopping nature — a disbalance in the order of the world. Not to mention, one would taint the core of these children — to fall in love with the world, even with a things like the mud-pool.
That’s how beings like Love were meant to be: free of fear, loving every part of this world because it was never about people and their reciprocation of feeling — it was always about them — expressing and devoting themselves to love without expectations. Not doing so would stifle them, numbing them to the possible joys of this world. Or even worse, make them afraid of loving by building several, thick walls in their hearts.
As Love witnessed nothing short of nature’s miracle unfold in front of him, he observed a slight crack in the thick walls he’d built to protect, what he thought, was his heart. It was never about romantic love, it was about all kinds of love. And the greatest injustice that he ever did to himself was let external perceptions of reciprocation and expectations taint what he was meant to do — love, just because.
And as Love began to remember who he was, he started forgetting other trivial things that society taught him. Sure, he’d occasionally remember for the sake of survival what his name was or where he worked, but he never bound himself to this identity. For he realized that he was only love that had no limits, no boundaries, no expectations — only expansive feeling.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: Nick Fewings on Unsplash