BENGALURU: Love feels like it is the most precious thing in the world when it happens. It feels like something that is literally worth everything one can think of, and sometimes, we do exactly that – prioritise that love so highly that we let everything else go for a toss, even actively discarding all else. In the desperate highs and lows of falling and being in love, wanting so much to somehow be loved back the way we want to be loved, and in the incredibly singular focus that love can give, we can pretty much get so obsessive about it, that we will do anything to hold on to the feeling – we could lie, cheat, steal and more.
Thing is, love isn’t really that precious.
Anyone who has lived through a love or few know that love, however amazing it might be, is one dimension of life – not the only one. We can and do live through heartbreaks. We can and do live without love, being alone, just by ourselves. Some for two nights or one, and some for all their years, to loosely quote Vikram Seth’s poem, “All you who sleep tonight.”
It can get very harsh and even despairing when love starts to crack and threatening to fall apart altogether. At such times, if we gave ourselves the time and space to see ourselves through all that pain, we could come out on the other side and realise that love is, after all, not everything.
Love is some thing alright, but it is far from being the alpha and the omega of life that we make it out to be. When love doesn’t quite work out the way we want it to work, it is one of the toughest things one goes through in life. The heart breaks, the body refuses to work, we feel like our brain is just a mass of grey concrete – hard and rough, and some days, it can seem like our soul is hanging on to our body by a thread.
Even if, in that moment, all we can do for days is to drink some water and maybe eat nothing more than a slice of bread, and otherwise just stay in bed, we need to just do it.
The pain does get easier to live with even if it doesn’t go away altogether. Our life gets bigger and we find that life is bigger, with deeper dimensions to it. The pain of losing love, knowing how anguished we can get, how hopeless and despairing, and allowing it to teach us that life is precious, not love by itself, that’s when we truly start to live.
We just need to know it. It helps if we could always know it, even before we ever experience the sweet pain of love and the harsh reality of a love falling apart, but often, we just have to experience it for ourselves.
Love is lovely, but no single love is really the most precious thing. Life is the most precious and life is lovable in and of itself.
(The writer’s views are personal)