Being in love

“I’m in love,” told me my neighbor.

“Congratulations!” I said, and asked, “you know what it means?”

“I thought I was broken, but now I see I’m not,” he replied.

I said, “it means that you can love. To fall in love, you must be able to love.”

He’s twenty six. We have a great reservoir of idealism and romanticism at that age. We should never loose it. They are a great strength, a great force. When I was even younger than my neighbor, I used to go to a jazz spot. There was a poster on one wall. It was a rather grotty (grotesque) face, with entangled hair and bugs walking on it. The face was saying, “I love you, and today everything seems beautiful to me”. My neighbor’s face reflected exactly that. It seemed funny to me, that my yesterday’s post had something to do with love. And today this chap said he was in love. When we are in love, we see the world with different eyes.

We don’t need, however, limit ourselves to be in love with a human being. We can be in love with life in all it’s forms. The rock breaking in the grass, the light of setting sun, giving its colors to mountains, rivers and oceans. The food we eat. “Oh, I love you so much that I would eat you, dear soup of mine.” Up to the smallest bread crumb we can love. And everything looks different.

This will work as long as it’s not a simple emotional lack of objectivity. On the contrary, genuine love is conscious love, the fruit of awareness, of seeing with objectivity and equanimity. In the case of romantic, personal love, it does not consist of hiding under the carpet what we don’t like of the other one. We love our beloved because he/she is the way he/she is. As in the words of the Beatles’ song, “cos the things you do, endear you to me, oh you know I will.”

We don’t need to be teenagers to be in love. We don’t need to be twenty six to be in love. What we need is awareness. The awareness that comes from mindfulness. Appreciate things-events by what they are. We need, simply, being able to love, and that is inherent to all of us. Love like children do. That’s their happiness. So, like in the poster, don’t worry about the bugs taking a stroll on your head. Be like my neighbor. Just fall in love, and make a toast to him and his beloved: may their union be always happy! and if you want to give it a little Irish touch, raise your glasses and say

May they live as long as they want
And never want as long as they live
Sláinte!