The Way I See It

All of my life I have been fascinated by love or the idea of love. Is it solely emotion or is it an idea within one’s mind? Or perhaps it is a combination, something I have come to think of as the emotional mind. Growing up my mother always told me, “There is no such thing as love”. As I matured I realized she was caused so much pain from love that she chose to cut it from her life as best she could. As I grow older, I am beginning to understand that statement more and more.

I’m not referring to a parent’s love for a child or vice a versa. Although that can exhibit the same disappointments at times. However, that sort of love doesn’t fade. Painful or not it remains. Joyous or not it remains. It is the only constant I have come to believe in, for not matter how cruel or unmanageable it may be at times, the love we feel for our children is always there;  and the love a child may feel, even for an abusive parent, is still intact after all the hurt has been inflicted. It is a true phenomenon in life to me.

I have been romantically in love a few times in my life. All of those times started out euphoric. The feeling was always good and always left a desire for more of the same. Unfortunately, I have also experienced great pain from those very same feelings of love that brought me such pleasure in the beginning. It has baffled me my entire life and has resulted in extreme skepticism about love and what it is and what it may be. Quite a while ago I wrote the poem, What is Love  and perhaps it wasn’t considered great by those who viewed it, but for me it spoke of my conflicted beliefs about love and how one can never be certain that it truly exists no matter how wondrous the lovers or spouses seem.

It has been my experience that with great love comes great pain.  For to love someone a person must care about everything that involves that person.  For if one didn’t care, then how could it be love?  For is not love the desire to make the other person happy at all times?  For is not love a feeling of empathy for the other?  For is not love an expression of complete desire and need of the other?  If those things are not felt than I say romantic love is not present.   Perhaps the feeling is carried over from that which we felt in childhood.  A need to belong, a cure for loneliness, a comforting gesture, and even a dependency.  That is the love felt by a child, but surely not romantic love.  Romantic love must be a combination of all those things; and above all the absolute wish for the well-being and happiness of the other person.  That is so very hard for human beings to do.  To be able to sacrifice, for lack of a better word, their own feelings for that of another.  My belief is that to love that way is to experience what love is and the trick is to continue to love one own’s self while experiencing it.  So technically, it is not a sacrifice at all, but a willingness to commit to a feeling felt so deeply it is unexplainable.

So is love a reality of the heart?  Or is it an illusion of a human’s mind?  These are age-old questions and I suppose the answer will continue to elude us.  I will tell you this, I would choose to experience always the euphoric aura of romantic love, but would forgo it completely if I knew that with it comes the excruciating pain it can bring.  Happy Valentine’s Day!

What is love?

Love is a moment, and too often it passes without a second thought.  It’s the one moment in your life in which everything is right.  Your faults and failures don’t matter.   Love is the moment you know why you’re here; it’s the answer you’ve sought. Love is the absence of emptiness.  Love is the sole reason you feel emptiness.  Love is a changeling.

It is different feelings in different people.  Love is a defined human emotion tugging for comprehension within the center of reason.  Love is the confidence to be. Love is essence of beauty.  Love is felt.  Love is neither intelligence nor a theory provoking process.  Love is the core of humanity’s beliefs.  Love can be paradise.  Love can be excruciating pain.    Love is a personal expression of inner self.  Love is a mystery waiting to be revealed.  Love is the driving force in the pursuit of happiness.  Love is self-deprivation in a quest toward selfishness of the highest form by creating happiness in another.  Love is what you feel it is and not what you think it is.  Love is unforgettably embedded in your being once it is truly experienced.  Love is a lifelong search.

                                         ~Kathy Napoli

And that is the Way I See It here in Brooklyn.

K