Thursday, October 6, 2011

As a kid, one of my favored pastimes was to dig through the Sunday newspaper to find the comic section to read.  Didn’t have much use for the rest of the newspaper unless I was in need of a current event article for school or sought newspaper to line the bottom of my exotic birdcages.  But the funnies section…yeah, that I loved looking at. 

One of my favorite comics was a simplistic one.  Done up as a one-frame black and white comic amongst a sea of prettier colored ones, this one always caught my attention.  It usually had an image of a male and female big doe-eyed couple and began with the caption: Love is….

Those comics included definitions of love such as, love is…walking hand-in-hand, or love is…watching a beautiful sunset, or love is…sharing a special moment with someone you care about.  Whenever I’d read the author’s vision of what love is, I’d get this warm fuzzy feeling and picture a perfectly content author/artist who had unraveled the meaning of life and knew how to differentiate between those things that were paramount and the ones that distracted from such.

Recently, I’ve found myself thinking back to those meaningful comics I sought in the funnies as a kid, and what love might mean.  I wonder if love is happiness…sadness…thrills…anticipation.  Or is love a perfectly blended medley of memories and madness so perfectly fused that one can’t differentiate where one begins and the other ends? 

Is love pain, sorrow and loss?  Pleasure, enlightenment and gain?  Does love leave us feeling giddy at the end of the day, or send us fleeing for the hills, overwhelmed by the totality of all that accompanies it?

Can love set us free, or does it bind us in a constrictive grip that makes it hard for us to think much less function?  Does love overwhelm or shore us up?  Is love something that can be assigned a label, or does its definition come at the cost of living—experiencing all its subtle and not so subtle nuances?

In my humble opinion, love is all I’ve explored here and so much more.  I’ve encountered love on some levels yet have so much more to learn.  I believe that to experience love means one must open themselves up to be hurled this way and that, as if a speck of dust in a violent hurricane.  Some of the ride is terrifying.  Other aspects are invigorating.  Still more leave one dazed and confused, wondering what the heck just happened.  There are moments when riding out the “storm” of love leaves one disillusioned.  But the most important thing to remember is that nothing lasts forever.  Things have their own seasons.  Holding firm to this belief allows one the intestinal fortitude required to see love through.