Love, Pain, Life.

"All we really want is love's confusing joy."

(-Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi)

There's a column in my favorite newspaper (Ahmedabad Mirror) that appears every Monday, called Message Parlor. I know that's a pretty cheesy name and the content is quite cheesy too - mushy messages from people to their loved ones. Messages which range from being direct lifts from popular SMS forwards and sentimental shayaris, to heartfelt words confessing or professing love, seeking forgiveness, or just plain wishing someone on a special day. But despite that, I still enjoy reading it if I have time because I usually find a couple of creatively-stringed-together words which I then note down in my cell just because I like them so much. I guess it's just one of those 'being a writer' things which I can't quite explain.

Anyways, what I've noticed since I started paying more attention to the column a few weeks back, is that almost every time, there are at least one or two messages from someone who is apologising to a loved one for hurting them. This reinforces an old Spanish proverb which is obvious to most of us:

"Where there is love, there is pain".

The pain may be occasional or it may be continuous, it may be slight or intense, it may be pardonable or unbearable, but definitely, every one of us has suffered at one point or another at the hands of someone we deeply love. It doesn't matter whether the person loves us back or not, what matters is how we give ourselves so completely to them that it's impossible to return to being the same person we were before we loved.

We give the person our everything - our most precious treasures - namely, our strength, our courage, our loyalty, our faith, our hope, our confidence, our ego, sometimes even our self-respect. We surrender our very spirit and soul to them, albeit unconsciously and without expecting anything in return but still trusting that they will care for and protect our virtues. Yet, more often than not, what happens is that the person doesn't so much as notice all that we've given them, never mind respect and guard it. They callously use our own greatest strengths against us and hurt us in irreversible ways, devastating ways, crippling ways.

They ruthlessly attack us when we've let down our guard and given up our innate defenses to them, when we are at our most vulnerable, our most fragile states of being. We end up like the toy that is pulled apart and mutilated by the very child it sought to please.

Why do they destroy us so, the people we love with everything we have? Why are they so ignorant, so aloof, so unaffected to our suffering, our devastation?

And worse, why don't we stop loving them? No matter how debilitating our pain, we still can't not love the person. We may 'move on', and we may 'get over' it, yet deep down inside, we continue to ache for them, at least a little bit. We may not love them wholeheartedly forever, but a small part of us definitely does. And we never really stop caring for them, we just strive to stop SHOWING how much we do.

"Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them."

(-Hermann Hesse)

Nor do we learn lessons not to love that way again. We may become weary and more cautious of people, and we may take time to open up to others, but eventually, we end up surrendering ourselves to love in the same way all over again.

Despite terrible experiences that leave lifelong emotional scars, we still love again, sooner or later. Perhaps it is a show of the resilience of the indomitable spirit of our soul, or perhaps it is just a basic human need to find love no matter what, but whatever happens, we give ourselves to another person again, even at the risk of ending up vanquished by the storm that love is sure to stir up in our lives, one way or another.

“Love is like the truth, sometimes it prevails, sometimes it hurts.”

(-Victor M. Garcia Jr.)

Why we love someone is a debatable question - one with no clear cut answers - and why we invariably hurt those who love us, is yet more complicated. But the truth is that love is integral to our survival. It is a universal language, it is something no human being can escape, whether he is good or evil, young or old, fit or ailing, beautiful or not so much, civilian or outlaw, religious or atheist, loving or hateful. For hate too, stems from love itself. Without one, the other cannot exist.

However, it's good to remember that:

"Hate leaves ugly scars; love leaves beautiful ones."

(-Mignon McLaughlin)