One of the great experiences I have been able to have is to be able to write a lot of great things at my favorite coffee shop. One of the perks (no pun intended) has been to become friends with the people who work so hard to keep my coffee hot and flowing as I worked my way through many different writing projects. These people don’t know it, but their conversations with me provide a lot of writing topics. One of the most common
themes that they discuss is love.
Most of the people I am listening to are less than half my age, so I incline to roll my eyes and think that they don’t know what they are talking about. But on further review, listening to the hopes and dreams from a young person’s perspective of love, there is a hope that comes back to me. I think that I have forgotten or, better yet, looked past what it means to be in love.
What did I forget? The feeling of love when it is new. As I have gotten older, that feeling is either something that I don’t think is possible or fear because I know the pain of being hurt. Great beginnings become painful endings. The possibility of that pain becomes too much sometimes.
Through that lens, it is difficult not to feel people are
being unrealistic when they are 20 and say that they are so in love and will spend the rest of their lives together. The first inclination is to tell them they don’t understand how long life is or how much they will change in the next five years, let alone the next twenty. Then again, who am I to advise like I am the expert on love? I am clearly not.
The discussions around this topic, though, have reminded me of the times my mind was affected by love. We discussed how you live to hear the voice of the one you love and will talk with them all the time because they make your heart go “pitter, pat.” The happiness that comes just from being with them, and that nothing else and no one else in the world really matters. Just you and the one you love. Paradise!
Every person in people’s history has been there before, and the heights of love make life all that more enjoyable. Food tastes better, experiences are more fun, and that person enhances the ability to grow because you want to become more for them. That is a view of love that a younger person has, and an older person forgets because they know the other side of the experience.
There is a dark side to love for that high that comes when a person has no idea about the potential pain.
When that love is taken or dies on its own, deep, dark soul building moments of sharp pain and emptiness, where you are so empty because you realize that what is left inside you is a vast space with nothing to fill it, the love is gone, and you can’t replace that hurt with someone else or something else, although you may try.
The scars that are left by this experience will teach you a lesson, and often the simple solution to this problem is to shut yourself off and don’t allow that power of love to enter into your life again. Control how you feel, and don’t let anyone close who might be able to bring out these emotions grow inside of you again. That has been my life for a long time.
Here is one person who is not too stubborn to learn from the young people in the world when it is appropriate. There is a heart in all of us that deserves to be loved and to experience love. It should seek the happy, giddy, and unbridled enjoyment of being with someone else, being “crazy” about them, and enjoying the experience of being in love and being less afraid of the experience.
So I urge you all to reach for it, open up for it, and to seek love without fear and to invite it into your life and let yourself have love as idealistic as your heart belongs to a young person. Force someone else to roll their eyes at you each day because you are clearly so in love.
If love isn’t a part of your life then, what is the point of it all? If you have love in your life, nurture it and deliver empathy to the one you love always. Never take it for granted because it doesn’t happen all the time. Treasure the love that you have and the experience of being in love.
