Monday, July 28, 2014

The Math of LOVE


"She thoughtlessly walked on the sands of today, leaving behind footprints of memory and then one day she banished into the waves"

They say Love is Beautiful. But what they don't tell us is the not-so-beautiful experience love leaves behind, when it departs. It tricks us to believe that someone can mean the world to us, making us leave our world aside. It makes us kneel, fall and skip heartbeats in its presence. It makes us count the moments spent together and create a host of memories which are not only difficult to let go but also difficult to relive with someone else.  And whenever this kind of Love leaves, be it after years, weeks or days, we are relentlessly destroyed for the other someone who can or will, be.

So can Love really be measured?
We measure love by the time spent together and by the time we cannot spend apart, the number of missed calls left unanswered and the number of minutes between each text message, the number of weeks before it is made ‘official’ to the number of months before it is called off.  We get easily caught up in the mechanics of love that we too often forget its quiet, indisputable now-ness. Isn't life already too scheduled to measure the intensity of emotions, leave alone Love.
The degree of hurt when the person in subject depends entirely on the degree of vacuum left behind by the person. Now how can one fill this void and to what extent? Like at times we might get the math wrong, the same can happen to Love.  And like in math when we get too messed up with the calculations, it's best to wipe it all off and start again, with the same variables, on a new page. Its best to start afresh!

As Samuel Leighton-Dore  quotes it best:
“ We need to harbor our love as though nobody in history has ever experienced a thing like it - as if there were no rules, no guidelines - no hints, tricks or clues. We need to harbor it as if there was no time - as if there were no numbers, and even if there were, they wouldn't even matter. To the world your love might be irrelevant and perhaps so, it must be. “
While most of us would disagree I take the liberty to say that Love, simply put, isn't numeric. There is no ideal way to measure it, or to sum it up. What love must teach us is to lead our life with someone, to accept there is some place empty that needs to be filled with care. But it should definitely not imply living someone’s life, like our own. Love which makes you forget yourself is no love at all. Love must make us, better versions of ourselves. And remind ourselves that we ARE capable of love and not merely crippled by it.