Category: Thoughts

A very dear friend of mine recently commented on my Facebook about a Tweet I recently posted.  The comment itself included a statement trying to clarify his “(c)omment on this story (my tweet) of unrequited love.”  And it is to this “unrequited love” that induced in me thoughts of whether this (unrequited love) is a good thing, a bad thing, an indifferent thing, or even a meaningful thing.  First, the below is only tangentially, at best, a response to my friend’s comment.  As such I am neither trying to refute or otherwise repudiate his statements.  Nor am I, per se, trying to persuade anyone of my position; I am merely trying to express, inform and possibly “think out-loud”, as it were, my own cogitations.

The word, unrequited, at least denotationally is a rather straight-forward one of:

unrequited |ˌənriˈkwītid| adjective; (of a feeling, esp. love) not returned or rewarded.

However, there is an interesting thing when we turn to its connotational form.  I have no specific reference other than to draw from myself, but when I hear the words “unrequited love” it brings to mind a tragedy for at least one party.  How can it not when so much of the common canon of love speaks to being loved?

If you wished to be loved, love.” – Seneca, Roman philosopher

If this is true then unrequited love implies a sense of pointlessness.  Unrequited love bumps up along infatuation in so much that it only requires one person to feel something, and in so much that the two do touch they share a mutual connoted sense of futility.

If we remove for a second that love must be returned in order to be rewarded, then unrequited love merely denotes rather plainly and factually that the love is unidirectional.  However, if we argue as Seneca does, then we might argue that love is driven by a simultaneous connection of affections; that love is bi-directional.   While there is an obvious emotional attachment to requited (reciprocated) love, I do not agree that love requires reciprocation to be meaningful or worthy of consideration.

To get at what I mean by this, let me side-step to one of the greatest sources of suffering in the world: expectations we levy both on ourselves and others.  This, of course, is not something novel but has a long, deep discourse in Buddhism.  Whenever we love with the understanding that the target of our affections also love us in return we are levying unduly an expectation on them.  Namely, we form our love upon a condition: if you love me then I will love you.  Or worse, the conditional becomes an imperative: I love you therefore you should (must!) love me.  Both of these propositions are, to me, wholely inappropriate and therefore more so woefully inadequate to qualify as anything approaching meaningful (selfless) love.

At some perfunctory level I appreciate the sentiment of Seneca: the reward for loving others is to be loved in return–give love first before we receive love second.  It is sanguine sentiment, and I believe it is better to see Seneca speaking to acts of selflessness than to the nature of love itself, though.  To wit, for me love should always be unidirectional, starting from myself and extending outward to all other peoples.  A person who hates me is still a person I love.  A person who loves me is a person I love. I do not love them for any other reason than that I love them–on my terms and without expectation of reciprocation or benefit.

While not central to my current thesis, I might add that when love is returned I believe that a “state change” occurs.  It moves from an internal manifestation to an external one, from a (mere) potential to a (substantial) kinetic.  This state change is a powerful one; so much so that it is what I consider “fate” is all about: two persons intersecting in space and time and consciously deciding to love each other.  Regardless, the absence of this state change does in no way dilute love in its internal (unrequited) form.  Yes; I love another person.  Yes; it is not reciprocated: it is unrequited.  These are facts.

But these facts bely the nature of my love and the state of my mind.  I levy no expectations on how this love is returned let alone whether it is returned at all.  Success, as it were, is not predicated on whether they love me.  I do not need them to love me in order for me to love them.  And yes, it is more than likely–almost guaranteed–that they will never love me in the fashion I love them.  But I do need to love them in order that I love myself: because the love I have for them is tied up as an expression of who I am–it is nothing more nor nothing less than this.  To re-iterate, I love a person–this person–as much for who they are not as for who they are.  Which is to say, if they do not love me then I love them for that, too.  Love is not an action with an outcome, its success is not predicated on the laws of causality–of cause and effect and of an outcome external to itself.  Love is a state of being, an emotion, and it is itself justification for itself.  I love.  It is enough.

Some analogies have a way of sticking with you even as you forget them, only to remember them anew years (even decades) later.

I love sailing even though I am not a sailor. I neither own a sailboat nor have I been on a sailboat more than a dozen times in my life. Even so, I believe in my heart beats a sailor. In the first moments I first boarded I felt something–someone–calling me. In those first steps onto the boat I was no longer There, I was Here. And Here I was not alone. But I only discovered who–Her–when I finally laid my hand on Her. It was only at the moment contact with the till–Her till–that I understand what She was trying to say to me. I felt Her. I heard Her. I even tasted Her. But I also instantly understood Her. As I stood there my eyes extended past Her bow and I felt the world dissolve itself into its primordial forms: Wind and Water and Sky; and, She and I were center to these three elements. I knew then that I loved Her more than anything before or after.

You do not simply make love to Her; She makes love to you on Her terms and Her time. And you must be content with that. She is always both before you and above you. She will talk to you in tight, crisp snaps of Her sails. She neither compromises herself to lay listless to the norms, nor play rogue by bullying Her way into the onrushing crowds. She leans into World and communicates Her contentment. If you are too shy, asking too little of Her then She pouts in deflated flamboyance. If you ignore Her limits which She always knows better than you, then She beckons to you to relent; a defiant shove of Her tiller. And when you find yourself flying along with Her, She holds your hand firmly, resolutely while Wind sings with Her their joy to be one with you.

But I also learned that She never goes directly to her destination along the simplest nor straightest path. Wind is of its own mind and so both are entangled in a weave across and through each other. You can only point for but a little awhile on any given course till you need to tack back. At any one moment, if anyone were to project forward your destination based where you were aimed they would be wrong; you never go with Her where you are aimed, for where you are headed is always somewhere else.

So is Life–my life. Now on my distant horizon rests solidly a lone, green Cedar Tree upon Snowy Mountain, red Sky of liberation descending into the reddish waters. It is where I am aimed, for I follow my love to Her. I follow my love with Her. But it is worth repeating: it is for now only where I am aimed; I know not where I am headed. But wherever I am headed I do I love Her. Always Her.

Always.

It is maybe a strange thing to say, but I love my commutes.  I happen to live along a bus-route that has direct connections from a bus stop right outside my home, dropping me off nearly to the doorstop of my office building (if a 76-story building can have a doorstop).  On the better days I wake up early to a 10K run, come home to a french press pot of coffee and homemade cereal and hot shower, only to get myself tucked into a 20- to 30-minute ride into downtown on the metro bus.  On my way to work I sit with a good old-fashioned, bound-and-printed book.  It is quite simply a commute that in and of itself I love.  But there is often one spot along the commute that makes me forget it all.

I come upon this spot just as we reach the bridge.  Maybe it is the change in the sound going from different grades of road, but I instinctually look up from whatever I am reading.  I will turn my head eastward looking out over the waters between Lake Washington and Lake Union, University of Washington sitting along the northern banks all the while the Cascade mountains sit stoic, immovable and resolute as the Sun rises up and over its granite shoulders.  Once my eyes catch those crags I can no longer hold myself back in my seat, my eyes are fixed on that distant horizon and all else dissolves away.  I can feel myself losing the grip on the open pages of my book, I can hear the rough paper slipping from under my fingertips and I know all but helplessly that even as the book closes in my lap I will not look down to attend to it.  I have no strength of will in my body to turn away–I look transfixed to whatever is without the bus.

I can smell light.  I can taste moisture.  They rest solidly, comfortably in my nostrils.  They are strangers I have never introduced myself to; I know them, they do not know me.  I feel neither remorse or embarrassment to come upon them so brazenly, they, snowy mountain and waking morn’ Sun, in their lover’s truss.  I feel a love seeping into my roots, a love that is not shaken or disturbed by the silly machinations of this simian civilization–our civilization–gone awry.  Steel girders flash in front of my face, reminding me that man is the intruder here, our time is measured to the takt of our daily lives, a furious set of movements from one moment to the next all the while out there it is timeless–not merely forever but beyond the very measure of time: eternal.  I futilely exert my will on the universe, asking it to make the snake that is space and time swallow its own tail, warp its own topology back onto itself to become a Mobius strip and we in the bus the ant traveling its spine.  I sit for but moments in the lighted shadows of these lovers and I feel here myself expanding into those lovers resting at my horizon.

I walk to the very edge of that horizon.  I am alone here at the edge of all senses and sense.  In front of me stands cold darkness of future-nows-that-may-or-may-not-come.  There is no longer any refuge in turning back and returning safely to my seat and my book and my commute.   Forward then.  I thrust forward my hand, it settles on a doorknob.  The door yields to my whim, and I stumble into an infinite space inside of myself pinched between who I am and who I might be.  I float adrift there while a pool of ignorance soaks into me deeply.  I know I cannot subsume myself wholly to this ignorance, nor the ignorance fully erase my boundaries; we so exist that the other might find definition: there is no sunrise without mountain, nor mountains to gaze upon without light.  The door closes behind me and I am left in my ignorance.  Here I am now, I think, but I am not alone.  She is also here, my lover, whoever she is, whoever she will be; she whom I have loved and do love and will love.  I cannot see her, I cannot know her.  But when I do finally meet her, whoever she may be, may it be here in this moment between moments on this way across a bridge in the morn that we find each other, define each other and are defined by each other.

This is why I love my morning commune.

((This may be remembered as the post that sent me to a place with nice people and padded walls.))

Some years ago there was an Iranian film festival in Seattle held at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI).  While every film I saw moved me in ways that are too distant to fully recast into words, there was one film on a person’s discovering themselves through their inner-child that resonated with me.  As much as it may have resonated with me, it was some years before I revisited the idea for myself.

When something bad happens for the first time you can always chalk it up as a fluke.  But when lightning, as the case may be, strikes in the same place twice we must seek what is attracting the strike.  Or as one poster once quipped, “The only consistent feature of all your dissatisfying relationships is you.”  And my second divorce was this to me; a failure I could not write off as fluke.  In the process of going to therapy I discovered myself “talking” to various past versions of myself.  I was coincidentally reading Hermann Heese’s semi-autobiographical novel “Der Steppenwolf“.  In the book the author talks about the infinite set of selfs that fracture off from the present self as time passes by; our self is not one self but a composition of these infinite selfs strung along and held together by a shared thread of space and time.  In the process of this therapy I was often asked to give an age to the voice I was interacting with.  This process of identifying an age allowed me to isolate my present self from these previous selfs and furthermore pinpoint some event or period in my life that remained unresolved.

Coincident to all of this, I also recall myself every day wondering if I could let go of past conceits.  In many senses I was trying to strip away layer upon layer of my self-made delusions about myself and my past relationships.  And every day I felt myself dig deeper into a well that I constructed for myself.  Every day I went deeper into soil, deeper into the cool recesses of Mother Earth under the shade of cool, green leaves.  Instead of therapy changing me, it un-warped me and let me become more–for lack of a better description–me.  Then one day there was no more soil to dig because I broke through and fell into blue sky where I floated, surrounded by light.  There was no Earth above or below me; it is all sky and all light.  And I knew, at least for that moment, that I was as close to my center as I had ever been.  Peace filled me even while I felt a duality of sadness at the hurt I had caused others–especially others I deeply loved–and happiness for finally coming home to myself.

This was over a year ago.  Since then I have found it easier and easier to let go of so many things that I once would hook into myself, making myself believe I needed them.  There is an amazing amount of peace that comes from letting go of so much, but most of all from letting go of my ego.  Without ego there are no defenses necessary to maintain, no need to project an image of myself for others to interact with.  I can just be me, all the while fully accepting the consequences of such.

But here is where strangeness, real strangeness, enters into things.  Only recently something interesting has been happening to me in quieter moments, although I acknowledge that I find listening to music makes the process almost effortless.  I find that I can open a door inside of myself and float back into that sky filled with light.  In that space I find myself and all of my former selfs looking back at the present me.  It is utter peace. More than peace, it is sheer happiness.  I feel flooded with light; the light flows past and through me and I find my edges dissolving into the horizon.  I no longer feel like I am anywhere or in any one time, even though at some level I still can recognize a certain connectedness to Now and Here.  It is not just a passing thing, but minutes and tens of minutes can pass before I even realize that I am coming back to this Here and this Now.  And as often as not it is then I realize my cheeks hurt from smiling and my eyes are wet.

I do know what it is.  The analytical, scientific, objective portion of me thinks of endorphin and dopamine being released in my neural cortex whereby elation and even euphoria can be induced.  And certainly, this may be the very chemical reason for all of this.  But I also wonder if this is why civilization after civilization has sought spirituality, even required it in order to remain sane?  For the first thirty-six years of my life I was by-and-large without this sense of wonderment and joy that comes from feeling connected to something larger than myself; and I truly believe I failed to grow as a human being: I was stunted.  Ironically, I feel connected to the Universe not by forgetting who I am but instead letting myself fill out and into all that I can perceive.  Still, I do not know what is is; but I do know I love it.  Or maybe it is better to say it is love.  And that is enough.

Fuck Fate.

I am sure some will cringe reading that.  And maybe those who do will think my use of the expletive “fuck” is offensive, or as a minimum you consider it (even me) crude.  But it is not; nor am I.  Although, I will concede to these people that for in sooth the sentence includes crudeness, albeit one of a more sublime sort, one that we so often use in our daily lives and yet never give much deep heed to its implications: fate.  Fate is crude.  Fuck Fate.

I have my sense for what Fate is and is not.  And the neo-classical sense of the word is a cancer that rots the life and ruins the soul of people who conjoin themselves to it.  Whenever we Hope (and we will get to that shitty word in a moment) that the gods or God or even three sisters sit somewhere eternal ordaining for us our destinies then we allow ourselves an opt-out clause from reality.  Fate is not something decided for us, it is decided by us.

Fate, if there is such a thing to begot in this world then is merely the intersection of potentials turned into kinetic form: this is fate, not Fate.  Two people meeting for the first time is representative of such an intersection.  What they decide to do with that opportunity–or not to do as the case may be–is the whole measure and sum of fate.

In my desertion of Fate as some crippled, infirm of purpose denizen of ill-got nether-dreams, I implicitly declare to you that Life is not at about passively hoping for “sonorous moments when Time stops itself for us”; I instead declare that we must fully commit ourselves and exercise our Time on this Firmament to find for ourselves the things we need.  Live our Life in the Now and only the Now, awaiting neither godly proclamation or Fate to make Heaven on Earth for us.  Do the needful, even be the needful, but never be the needy.

And while we are on this topic.  Fuck Hope.  And fuck Despair, too.

Right on the heels of Fate is Hope.  If there is nothing else to live in than the Now then there is no Hope, nor its dire sibling Despair.  More precisely, there is no need for Hope or for Despair.  These are both borne when we are unable, even unwillingly, to embrace Now as it is (and is not).  It is only in that moment when we forsake both any resignation to our Past and fear for some indeterminable Future that we step fully into Now.  And from this place–Now–that we will find neither room nor need for Hope or Despair.

Life has no memory of the former Nows, the things we collectively call Past.  All those Nows exist separate and distinct to each other even as one Now leads to the next Now.  Yes, the gestalt–the form of Now–is sum total of all previous Nows but it is so without sense of judgment or perspicacity.  Future is not yet born as it were; more accurate it is to acknowledge that it is never ever really born.  Future exists only as a concept, a conceit even, of the sentient mind that projects itself from this very Now onto some other Now not yet realized.  Hope and Despair are then children who inhabit this Future we form from our very minds.  Neither are real or necessary; their very existence is contingent upon us requiring a belief in some pre-ordained nature to the Universe–Fate.  But without Fate and that unreality we call the Future we can eject fully from our Lives both Hope and Despair.

And thus this is how I awoke this morning feeling neither Hope nor Despair in Life.  In the modern canon of Society it may seem to many that I awoke in a stupor, a resignation to the World around me.  But this is the farthest thing from the Truth.  I feel no Fear for the things I care most for nor or the people I Love.  And trust you I believe I Love more truly than any other previous Now in my Life.  It was only when I awoke this morning in the absence of Hope and Despair that I discerned that both Hope and Despair as stony buttresses to a prison that held me captivate to some Future I felt Fate might once engender on my behalf.  Indeed there is still fate but no Fate; indeed there still is an infinite set of intersections in the Life that I have remaining.  And I will decide upon them as they come, never before their time nor after in reflection, but only as I can, only as I meet them Now.