"I'm thinking of..."

I've been doing writing exercises out of Natalie Goldberg's "Old Friend from Far Away" which are basically 10-min free writes prompted by a single phrase, written freehand. This is one of them.


I'm thinking of Flora, where things went wrong. I mean this is the person I thought to be the love of my life, what else could I be thinking about? I find myself up late at night researching all the scientific perspective about the biological and physiological reaction in our brains that happen when we experience love and lose it. From preliminary findings, I see that 'love' is akin to a drug addiction, that our minds react in attach and detachment in a similar fashion to a chemical dependency. While I certainly see the validity to that comparison, part of me believes that deducing love down to a mere biological reaction somehow robs part of its magic and power. I think what I find interesting about the book is that it is an evidence to our constant need and striving to know, how we cannot be at peace with recognizing and accepting that there are merely some forces in the world so grand that they are meant to be left not understood, that our constant awe and curiosity is exactly what gives that force such great power.

I have a firm belief that love is the greatest force on earth, and I mean a true love. I think what those teams of scientists and psychologists are defining are sensations and feelings related to love, but not actually love itself. Call it infatuation, call it lust, call it whatever the hell you want to call it, but I think the bane of the distinction is whether or not it comes from a place of selfishness.

See, I'm starting to see w/ Flora that what I had w/ her was in fact quite selfish. It was something that felt so good that I wanted to hold onto it, have it be mine. I've been told time and time again that love is meant to be free. I guess as great and romantic that saying goes, it is much harder to actually do when time comes to let go. But I guess that's the whole irony of love. Sometimes it's like a plant, and attending to it too much suffocates it to death. The scary part is that it might never come back if you let it go (which is a very real possibility w/ Flora and I), but perhaps the key is to continue caring for it from a distance, w/o attachment to the outcome, and you let faith carry you the rest of the way. Either way, I think practicing and learning how to love in this fashion, regardless of the outcome, will make you a better person in the end.