On love.

There are a few things in my life that have turned out better than I expected. And, I guess if you look at it from the right angle, it's really just one thing. Love. With everything (else), I am constantly in the process of developing expectations. Grad school sure didn't meet expectations. Clothes and fashions fade. People change and sometimes disappointingly don't follow through. The food never comes out tasting quite as amazing as it smells. I mean, I still enjoy wearing clothes. And shoes too. And it's not like grad school is awful. And I still do love to eat. But I guess, in economic language, the costs and benefits seem to equate to an equilibrium in which benefits and costs seem to balance each other out, where every now and again the benefits are marginally higher than the costs, or vice versa.

But love, even with its burden and its intense vulnerability, never just balances. It's not coincidence that love is the undertone of almost every song, or that every good story captures some dimension of love. (I also think it's sad that it is so often dismissed as frivolous or unreachable, particularly as a solution to many of the world's problems. I get that love is non-rational, but I don't think that means incomprehensible. I think the real reason for its dismissal is because it's hard.) It is so brilliant how even years and years of loneliness and pain can be swallowed up in love. In fact, I think it is the only non-counterfeit thing that can actually displace those other feelings, the only thing, at least in my experience, that is more real than pain. Because it doesn't just cover up or distract from pain. I feel like love actually transforms the loneliness (or what have you--mine is loneliness) by imbuing it with meaning, so it doesn't even feel like a burden at all.

I have spent a majority of my life looking for it--and if you can't tell from the way I talk about it, my expectations of it are high. But I knew it when I found it, because it exceeded even my highest expectations. And was bewildering though too, because while I was looking for it in the grand cosmos of everything, it turned out to be so ordinary. No newly discovered logic, no grandiose presentation.

And every time I think I understand it, God shows me how much more there is to learn about love. And now it's happening again. Forever :)