Category: Thoughts

In my last post, Words, I ended on the word alone and the self-actualized person.  But there is another set of words, to be in love and to love, that come to mind as another fine example of the conflation of causal over casual relationship.

To be in love is the both the great gift and possibly even greater scourge to come out of the 12th and 13th centuries economic and religious doldrums, swirling down the courtesan halls in both handkerchief and corset alike in European courts of the 16th and 17th centuries, culminating with Romanticism in the late 18th century that heralded arguably the modern age where we find ourselves now.  The great emotion!  The greatest of emotions?  To be in love is to to be in a continual state of ecstasy, an endorphin rush of sing-song dance and technicolor bliss that washes away all mars of age and life, leaving us and the target of our fixation as unblemished, godly perfection brought down from the Heavens and put on this earthly firmament in human guise.  This is nothing to be trifled with; to be in love should be put in a medicine bottle with one of those caps that requires monkey-like dexterity, cunning intellect, and herculean strength to open.  Potent stuff, indeed!

I am tongue-in-cheek with this state of human arousal because it in part enjoys such a deep seat of reverence in our culture, one that is at times deserved but more than not misplaced.  And let us be clear, this is not the stuff that fuels only the girls who grow up dreaming of being swept off their feet; boys, too, want to find their soul-mate in love and live happily every after.  It is part of culture, one that is never challenged or explored but accepted and expected. But what if to be in love is a mere feat of the external form, a consequence of a potent concoction of chemicals in our bodies?  How then do we examine this thing, this emotion?  It is just one form of lubricant before another kind of lubricant, all but to help get an improbable rock rolling down the hill, we then falling into the bushes and nine months later three walk out?  To be in love is a grand thing for sure.  It is a wonderful thing.  It is a splendid thing. But it is an emotion, not a state.  And it is as dangerous as any sin when we conflate it with love itself.

But before we get to this mating as it were of to be in love to to love, let us first clear up a potent conflagration of words when we use to be in love with someone who we attach the label “soul-mate”.  I have experienced from both ends the devastation of attaching our sense of soul-mate to the person we are in love with.  It is quite understandable, even natural, that the person who is the center of our emotional universe should also straddle the center of our spiritual and substantive universe.  But no matter how strong this connection appears to us, I can guarantee you that if you are in love with someone now then eventually, eventually indeed, you will not be.  There will be a morn, some morn, when you wake up, turn over to them and you realize you are no longer in bed with a person you are in love with; whatever passionate fire that consumed you for them will have been utterly, completely extinguished.  It may indeed also be very true and likely that some morrow after your passions will be rekindled, but in the interim you will not be in love with them.  Period.  Full stop.  Given this then how devastating indeed is it for us to attach the most sacred role one can occupy with another person — soul-mate — in connection to at best a perennial emotion: to be in love?  One moment we are in love with our soul-mate, the next moment we are not in love and they, too, then are not our soul-mate?  Sound ridiculous?  It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous.  But in our culture this is the norm, not the exception to the gestalt of being in love, we confuse our lovers with our soul-mates but then wonder why we find ourselves confused and disappointed when they “disappear.”  They did not disappear; they never existed as our soul-mate in the first place.

As depressing as this may all seem, it is not.  Let us return to our other infinitive form, to love. While I have no inkling of the relative closeness or distance between the etymologies of to live and to love, for myself the only significant difference I can tell between the two is the one I can spell: i versus o.  For myself, to love is life made manifest and whole, it is taking all the potentials of our the world and people around us and making it wholly manifest through our simple act of acceptance.  To love is to be in a state of acceptance, no more nor no less.  I do not believe you can both love a person and also judge a person.  We can and should love every person we meet — it is both our sacred duty but greater still blessed gift to learn about the world around us through the act of accepting people for who they are and are not.  If we believe the world must be good then it is difficult, even impossible, to truly love everyone we meet.  We create a schism whereby we must sit as judge over people, putting them in our various arbitrary camps of good and bad.  And if we wish to throw the Hitlers and Stalins of the world into this argument then we confuse the extremes with the middle.  We are all humans; we all, every one of us, are imperfect.  We do both good and bad things even as we are all good people.  At least in my own experiences, people who judge others are most often the self-diagnosed victims, too hurt and angered by the indifference of the universe and prompted by their misguided belief that the world should be fair, that in their act of self-defense that they lose the ability to recognize this simple fact: good people do bad things.  I am hungry to make this point that judgment is in polar opposition to love.  Love tempers us, tenders us with the capacity to forgive.  We forgive the people we love who hurt us for that simple fact that good people, all people, do bad things.

When we do finally come to accept the world and more so accept ourselves as whoever we are alone then do we have a chance to find on the most intimate level, the most sacred of roles our soul-mate.  And it is only in this state of acceptance that soul mates can be found let alone nurtured and sustained.  Note my use of temporal change through the words nurture and sustain; soul-mates are not born but grown through shared experience.  When we accept (love) a person for who they are and are not, we are ready to take a journey with them through life.  We are able to accept the many forks and cul-de-sacs they take as they learn and grow, making mistakes and even doing bad things all the while remaining a good person and all the while we loving them for who they are and are not.  In this context we are able to grow with them and they with us; we are willing to let the road lead us on and forever on, and we find ourselves in places and in states we could have never have foreseen or imagined the long years before when we were merely in love but had not yet found love.  And once something as precious as love is found, I guarantee you there is no way to unfind it with the days you have left in this world: love truly is eternal and forever, it is life itself.

I never stop coming back to some words.  In reality, I come back to a great many words. I do not find too many remain stable for any rigorous intent using a single invariable, inviolate denotation. In the colloquial, words are slippery beasts.  Words are inarguably both as concept and as tool one of the greatest inventions of the human story.  Words set us free to express emotions, thoughts, and ideas, encapsulating in succinct sound-bites whole abstractions and experiences into easily digestible chunks that are transferred endlessly from person to person, long after their first utterance is made.  Words are a short-circuit between everyone’s disparate realities, ever-rolling through time, compressing into inexpensive, cheap even, alternatives of the real thing.

Words themselves never lie, albeit they oft times fail to convey the truths they are entrusted to represent.  It is easy to hide (from) assumptions that come embedded in words; entire civilizations’ core values and wisdoms become mashed, boiled, and then finally, brutally distilled into a form often far afield from their original inspiration and intent.  Words, so intended to liberate and transcend us past the temporally-trapped nowness of our existence, can equally imprison us into perceived realities that neither listener nor speaker understood or intended.  What fascinates me even more than simple deviation between denotation and connotation, intended versus perceived meanings of words is when words that are apparently, superficially congruent are instead subtly in diametric opposition.  There are two that come to mind: alone and lonely; to love and to be in love.

Etymologically speaking, lonely is the adjectival form of lone.  And lone is merely the aphetic shortening (dropping of the initial, unstressed sound) of alone.  And alone is a contraction of all ana (all by oneself), or more literally wholly (all) one (ana).  I write all of this to evidence the fact that these two words are deeply related to each other, at least linguistically; however, in my own experience this is as far as the two words go in terms of relationship; linquistic but no more.  Lonely, and its first-cousin, loneliness describe an emotional state; whereas, alone merely describes an observation of the physical state.  And here is where I found myself making a near fatal mistake: lonely and alone do not form a tautology; to be in one state does not imply the other state is also true. To be alone does not mean lonely, nor does to not be alone mean you are not lonely.

I am sure this, at some intellectual level, is a mere curiosity that is quite apparent upon casual inspection; it may even be to elementary to you, the reader.  I can assure this was not the case for me.  I know for myself these distinctions alluded me at some level deeper than mere cognitive recognition for nearly the entirety of my first 35 years of life.  I grew up believing that the cure to my loneliness was to not be alone; if only I could find another person to share my life then I would no longer be lonely.  Why?  Because, simply put, alone and loneliness were at deep, primordial level a tautology to me, interchangeable words that only varied by grammatical usage.  Yes, I could be heard quipping “I am alone, but not lonely” and sometimes this was true but I also felt that this kind of existence was better left to a once-and-awhile-kind-of-thing; much better be it if I were to share my life with another person and therefore avoid all together the whole rather icky matter of “alone but not lonely”.  Loneliness for me seemed like a permanent, perennial condition of my existence, and what I lacked to combat this depressed state of existence was a deep connection with another person to ward against this even deeper sense of emptiness in myself.

It was not till my recent divorce that I finally came to understand the insanity, the very untenable position, of this tautology I was trying to maintain between alone and loneliness.  I vividly recall my then fiancee and I — both recovering from our failed first marriages — sharing with each other our belief that being married to each other to share our lives with was a great and noble means to obtain contentment.  But embedded in that sentiment of sharing our lives was also a deeper fear that our loneliness stemmed from our being alone; ergo cohabitation through the virtue of marriage would nicely cauterize the bleeding we both felt at being alone and lonely in a rather cold and indifferent world.  Some two years later we found ourselves in a relationship to each other, not alone but feeling lonely.  For my wife the solution was divorce; but, that is another story which I wish to return but later and on the matter of being in love and to love.  Nevertheless, I found myself again alone, and most poignantly so for me at a point in my life when I was looking forward to starting a family with my wife, comforted in the then irrefutable fact that I was going to spend the rest of my life with the person I deeply, deeply loved.  It was unbearable beyond words to discover all those dreams one moment here, the next moment fanciful memories.

A month or after she left I was taking a walk with a very close friend of mine who shared with me something that became a watershed moment for me.  Let me first put some things in context.  This friend of mine has the life I had hoped to build for myself, a person who in many ways I both envy and admire.  And because of this fact, I have often looked to him to suss out clues to the secrets that I was missing.  He turned to me and said as if he was telling me the weather, “Some days I just feel all alone in this world.”  Casual as he may have been, it was anything but for me.  It was like someone telling me gravity was up, that rain was dry, or snow was hot.  This could not possibly be: he lonely?  Surely, impossibly not.  He comes home to a wonderful wife.  His two children adore him and want nothing more than to play with their father when he comes home.  And when night comes they together put their children down to bed and then turn to each other, close the bedroom door and find sleep and comfort in each others warm embrace.  How could anyone be lonely in this context, I wondered.  But in the same moment I was wondering this was the very same moment another part of my brain snapped and the assumptions about causality between loneliness and alone exploded, and in their ruins remained a mere coincidence, a juxtaposition of linguistic curiosity and etymology.

Certainly I am not trying to speak universal truths; only that what I write next is my universal truth.  I have come to realize that the loneliness I felt is not the feeling of being separate from other people, it is the feeling I have when I am separated from myself.  And by separated I mean to imply uncomfortable: I was afraid being left too long to my own self.  And in this way the etymology from all ana makes startlingly sense: wholly (with) oneself.  More startlingly still is that loneliness is not some complimentary sister to alone, it is its very contradiction.  If we accept our original denotation of all ana then to be alone is to be wholly oneself then we are only true positively alone when we are wholly comfortable with being with ourselves, whole and separate from everything else.  The fact, even argument, that we do not feel lonely when we are with other people is explained best as a parlor trick of smoke and mirrors, a bit of sleight of hand whereby we misdirect our own mind from the discomfort we have being left in our own company.  Viewed in this light, alone is not just a state of physical existence but it becomes a critical virtue of the self-actualized person.  Alone is not something to obliterate, it is something to embrace.