Today was "me" time where I almost had nary a care in the world. I spent most of the day talking with my grandfather and siblings about our family business and then earlier, writing a post on my spirituality.
In between, I enjoyed a two hour break of total "me" time, doing what I haven't done in a gazillion years, which is singing thanks to the karaoke. The songs I chose which I sang one after the other (as I enjoyed my own concert with an appreciative audience of my own self) reminded me of how my friends and I would talk for days without pause about love. It seems like a lifetime away that my friends and I would philosophize about love and find ourselves and/or our romantic relationships failing.
In the last two years, we have gradually let go of our past time and trudged on to the real world of building our fortunes or at least making a living. The intervals of our get-together's have been longer (when before not a day would pass by without hanging out and musing loudly about our notions of love) and days and hours at work have grown longer.
Last Friday, the Gospel was about Jesus' commandments about loving God first and loving neighbors as we love ourselves second.
As I was belting out my preferred songs earlier tonight, I realized how love as we know it is a stranger to love as we divine it to be (to roughly quote Paz Marquez Benitez in her short story Dead Stars). Love as we know it is living with people who are hard to live with; working with and for people who sometimes make us lose our cool; doing things we love but at times not getting the desired product of our toil. Love as we divine it to be is always easy and two songs later, ends with a happy ending.
Another of my favorite quotes on Love is a sobering one by M. Scott Peck: “Love is not a feeling. Love is an action, an activity. . .Genuine love implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. . . . love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.....true love is an act of will that often transcends ephemeral feelings of love or cathexis, it is correct to say, 'Love is as love does'.”
Indeed, as in business and even in our spirituality, for most of us, love is the central force that drives us to discipline ourselves to make sense of both; to succeed in business, not only in numbers but in most importantly at the psychic level, there has to be love for the family that we feed and care for, love for the task we are doing and love for the people that we serve; we have to take time to put things into perspective and realize the talents that God has given us and treat adversities as building blocks (that are painful to lay one brick at a time) as we do our daily toil. In spirituality, we have to "buy" the ideas of our faith through experience and again, through putting these circumstances, past and present, into perspective and eventually truly owning the idea that yes, My God is for me. As one wise person had said, "If this (taking time to understand yourself and your life experiences) is not love, I don't know what it is!" Like in business, the latter is an ongoing lifetime process as well.
Romantic love, or love between two people is probably the same (single with no significant other here!). It takes many uneventful days of being together, understanding the other and making life of two previous strangers from different backgrounds work (not in necessarily in that order). What is more, just like in business, the success of an intimate commitment (as in marriage) is subject to unpredictable storms (temptations, perhaps or boredom, irritating habits of the other, annoying in-laws or friends). Talk about love God first, then your neighbor and self - make things work and let go of controlling tendencies! What a tall and unromantic order!
M. Scott Peck couldn't have been more on the mark when he said that "Love is as love does."
Earlier, one of my family members was talking about grand business plans while I stayed mostly on the conservative side knowing the fuller picture of the financial aspect of our trade. The daily grind of our work is not easy but in order to serve and in order to be fed, we have to keep it going and keep it going well. Grand plans to sum up to big numbers is overextending oneself. So I stated my case clearly and thankfully, that family member conceded (albeit begrudgingly). To me, this was love in the realistic sense.
The notion of love as being pink clouds has left me for now, and I am actually experiencing the "routine" of love as an action (and mind you, not in the romantic sense; I'm actually working for the love of my family - mainly my son and of course to maximize God-given the talent needed for my job). It is not such a glamorous picture, as I spend days with unkempt hair, working clothes and glassy eyes (from thinking things about business). It certainly is not as I divined it to be (coffee with friends day in and day out, sporting fashionable clothes, going on serial dates etc.), but thankfully, I still keep in touch with the same friends who have now ventured into this new kind of love and we still get to talk, though briefly, about how we manage to discipline ourselves in order to work effectively and still lead normal, love-filled (not necessarily romantic) lives.
As I was singing earlier, I though about how glad I am that I have crossed the threshold between the puffy-pink clouds kind of love I was obsessed about to my current obsession on the Real but Unromantic Notion of Love.
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