Love, change and beyond… Part One

Note: Thanks to “Tête-à-tête / Parinaz” for re-opening my Pandora box….

So many times in any given week, I tell to myself if only everyone could be brave enough to take steps to know and live their inner dreams, we would have been living in a world much happier and considerably fairer.

Today, after many ups and downs in my life, I believe that we all have the ability to change the path that we chose to walk in, to change the life that does not make us happy, to recognize our most inner wish and dream….we just don’t all have the courage to act.

To exist is to change- whether this change is in a “maturing” direction or not.
I think to mature is to go on and create oneself endlessly…But the reality is that even the changes that we long for them the most, bring a certain level of melancholy…after all what we leave behind is part of ourselves. It is mourning for a death and the joy for a birth…in order to enter another world, we have to end and die in the previous one….and that needs tremendous courage.

But I also learned, in my not very calm life, that there is another element that is a “must” and a “necessity” for any change. Courage comes only secondary to that.

A need, a desire, a force…that is what is a “must” for a change. I think right there lays my dilemma. What does each one of us use as a force, in order to change? I wonder….

One of the scariest changes in my life came when I totally switched the course of my career. I shocked many people when I stopped being a student in a master degree program for molecular biology and started the road in a life time study of holistic medicine. I remember in a letter to a dear friend, I broke the news with the Robert Frost poem: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

Today, years after that turning point in my life, I can not begin to understand the fear that surrounded my decision making moment. Was it abandoning the familiar and choosing the unknown? Was it the discomfort of starting from point zero? I don’t know…..But I remember very vividly what gave me the courage and became the force for that change: I was utterly unhappy and bitter with the road that I had in front of me.

One day the total lack of enthusiasm, hitting the rock bottom of unhappiness with my daily routine of life and never finding the answer to “why do I continue with this road?” made me JUMP….Jump from one side of the cliff to the other….and as Frost said: THAT MADE ALL THE DIFFERNCES.

I think the force there was the good old primal desire for survival. The bitterness would have killed me in a way that no “angel of death” could have!
Like any animal in this world, I had to survive….and to do that I had to change!

“They” say “love” can be a source for a change, “they” say “love” SHOULD be a force for a change….
Should it?
I don’t know….

Or maybe I should say: I am not sure I agree with the perception of majority of population about the love that brings “that sort of” change…and that always is a paradox to me.

All my life, the one constant point that kept me from drowning, was LOVE. Love was, is and always will be my North Star. I am an endless eternal lover. I love, love with all its sweet glories and bitter pains, with all the pains that comes from too much tenderness. I love, love with all the wounds that it brings me because of my own limited understanding of love at any given moment of life. It is a bleeding willingly and happily.

In the words of a sage: “love is a disease no one wants to get rid of. Those who catch it never try to get better, and those who suffer do not wish to be cured”.

As masochistic as it might sound, I do not regret any painful time that is caused because of love and longing that comes as a result of it. I bare my scars with honor, I cherish them like a woman that cherishes the pain of labor in order to taste that single moment of bliss of seeing her baby for the first time……

I have enough experince in my life to understand lust can be mistaken with love. I also came to understand and celebrate different types of love: from the roller coaster of Eros, to the safty and security of Philia, to the blissful, heavenly feeling of Agape….

To love so deep that you wake up and give thanks to be alive one more day, only to love again – that is the pure purpose of life….Loving on its own, in how ever shape or form it is, worth living in this world….

Does this make me too idealistic? If that is the case, so be it.

In all honesty, I gave up on the concept of ideal and real years ago…I am not sure anymore what exactly is realistic in this world, while reality changes so dramatically with each and every perception.

Having said all this about love, I do not belive LOVE brings any change other than making one person a better version of herself / himself. I am not sure love SHOULD bring ANY changes other than that….

And this is my paradox….

Should a lover be a reason to change? And if yes, does that change really a change? What if one day we will open our eyes to a whole new world, a world that does not “feel” that person any more? Should we get rid of the “changes” and move on?

We love, what the lover’s love. But do we ignore and abandon what we love as an individual?

I cherish the word of one of my all time favorite authors, Saint Exupéry, when he said “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction”.

In all honesty I cherish more the gazing so deeply at each other in order to find each others differences, uniqueness and deep inner beauties and ugliness…to find, celebrate and love them is a heavenly dimension of love, a dimension that can add so much to the lovers’ “growth” and “maturity”.

I think more than anything I believe in what “Prophet” said – and hope to love like that before I take my last breath:

“Love one another, but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.

For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.”