Thursday 29 October 2015

LOVE...

“A lover fears all that he believes.” - Ovid

One of the most fundamental and universal of human needs is that of finding a special person to share one’s life with. A soul mate, a life-partner, a person whom we can love and who loves us. That other half whom we seek in order to feel complete as individuals.

Plato in “The Symposium” says that according to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves. When one of the halves meets its other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other’s sight even for a moment...

Our need to love and feel loved in return often will dictate extraordinary behaviour and may cause us to go to astonishing lengths in order to attain our goal. Our interaction with people that come in and out of our life may go through different stages of intimacy until we meet “the one”. Quite often circumstance may conspire against us and the level of interaction with the object of our affection may be hampered by other people, distance, misunderstandings, misconceptions, inability to express our desires, failure of articulating our needs, or lack of courage to make ourselves vulnerable to another person.

To declare one’s love to another always is a difficult step and in order for it occur the time and place must be right. Sometimes it only takes an instant and two people fall into each other with the force of locomotives on a collision course. More often than not, the journey is slow and painful, full of wrong turns, dead ends and maze-like corridors with many branches and the encounter that occurs at long last is as gentle as a butterfly alighting on a flower.

But if the stars are aligned and if the two halves that meet are truly complementary, what joy! It is love, for what is love but the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete!

1 comment: