I want to get serious for a few minutes. I have a friend, a pen pal, whom I’ve been writing to on and off for about seven years. We always get down to the difficult questions and try to come up with an answer that satisfies us both. Sometimes we do disagree, but decide that the answer cannot be an objective one, so we leave it there.
Last week I had a crisis in love, specifically the things I was concerned I would be giving up for choosing love over security. This friend was the first person I thought to contact, as we have had multiple discussions on the subject in the past. I would like to share with you a few of the things that were discussed and I hope some of you will add to it.
Love versus security. It came up because of a few old crushes and flames who were coming around again to compliment me and wish that things had gone differently. I looked at my life and the difficulties that it will entail because I choose love over the security these others could provide. These difficulties are personal to my relationship with my boyfriend and are not inherent to choosing love over security. These struggles are also not important in terms of the rest of the discussion, so I will leave them private.
My friend responded to my inquiry by talking about inspiration. He believes he cannot be satisfied or truly in love without inspiration. He asked, if they (my boyfriend, old crushes or flames) disappear would love remain? Will inspiration still strike if they’re not lying next to you?
I think this may be a misunderstanding about inspiration. I’ve always been one to find it outside of myself, but lately have been trying to turn inside to locate it. It seems that when I was looking to external factors to inspire me, to make me happy, etc., I was in constant danger of losing it all at the disappearance of some stimuli or person that was out of my control. It is a dangerous place to be in terms of mental and emotional stability.
I’m working to form a personal philosophy of basing my happiness, inspiration, etc. on my inner being, while allowing the external stimuli or people to guide it. So, if my boyfriend is my inspiration and I lose him either through a breakup or death, my mental, emotional and creative stability is left mainly intact. The only difference being that the direction it goes in will change; it will latch onto something else for direction. Your base becomes your creative voice, and the people and situations you draw direction from evolve into your subjects. This idea allows the amount of creative output to be higher, as you can draw from more people and situations.
However, what does one latch onto within oneself to create the stable base? Is it one aspect of yourself, such as your career? No, because that’s almost as dangerous as basing it on something outside of you. If it fails, you fail. You have to base it on your whole person, so that if one or two little things change, the base is not at risk of falling to pieces. Knowing your whole person is another issue to overcome.
This goes hand in hand with defining yourself by the person you are with, which can be very dangerous. I know many people who always need to be with someone. Why? Well, without a boyfriend or girlfriend, or a husband or wife they believe they are nothing. They will mope around crying about exes, while wishing they were dating someone new.
This surely hinders one’s search for oneself. How can you truly discover who you are until you can accept yourself for what you are, with or without a mate? Being dependent on another for your happiness or worth is terrible. This is when you are truly nobody. You are an extension of someone else, feeding off of their livelihood to create your own life. A parasite, if you will. Living for another gives the other complete control over you.
Goals and achievements should bring pleasure to you first, and family, lovers and friends second. You should accomplish the goals you have set to impress yourself with your own ingenuity. If others are made happy because of it, well, that’s wonderful! But it should never be your sole purpose for achieving something.
After you’ve found yourself, what about a soul mate? Is there even such a thing? My friend sent me part of a letter I had written to him when we first started corresponding. In it I said, “Finding your soul mate is probably (I say probably because mine has yet to be found and I have no authority on the subject) the most rewarding thing that can be achieved in your life. To finally find that one who loves you unconditionally and completes your own soul must be the most incredibly overwhelming feeling. I just hope that one day I will experience it.”
Reading my thoughts on the subject some seven years later I find my younger self naive (weren’t we all?). I think it was childish of me to assume that love and finding your soul mate would be all sunshine and rainbows. Is anyone’s life sunshine and rainbows? Maybe we should ask the rock star who blew his brains out or the politician with a beautiful wife, children and home who risks losing it all to get his sexual needs filled by a prostitute.
Maybe a soul mate is something that needs to grow. Maybe we have the capability of having many soul mates. There are so many people we are compatible with and to become one’s soul mate you need that compatibility as a base from which to grow trust, love, and understanding. You essentially choose your soul mate by deciding who you will work on this growth with. Not to say that every person we come into contact with and who we are compatible with has the potential to be our soul mate. There needs to be something more there; a level of compatibility so high that it encourages this type of growth.
I have been able to be the most “me” with my boyfriend and I love him deeply for that freedom he inspires (among the many other things I love him for). I spent years hiding behind these different masks of self, which I would frequently change, but after we jumped several hurdles he and I were able to find comfort and security in one another, a place where we can be ourselves, together and individually. But hurdles there were. Maybe having a soul mate and being a soul mate is a matter of working together to conquer the next complication in your joint life and each one that follows.
A nice Bruce Lee quote to fit in here: “Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” Wouldn’t it be nice if we could join our strength to another’s to help overcome those big hurdles? Hell, even the smaller hurdles would be benefited by an extra hand! Maybe the world, maybe life and love isn’t meant to be perfect. Maybe it’s meant to be a test of our strengths, our ability to survive, to overcome, and to move on. Or maybe there is no inherent meaning in life and love, and we are simply meant to create our own. This fits when you acknowledge that life and love seem to have a different meaning to everyone; we’re all looking to get something out of each that maybe the people around us are not.
So, what is love? A loaded question! I doubt my definition is the same as yours is the same as my boyfriend’s is the same as a man or woman I pass on my morning commute. That’s what makes the question so loaded. It’s subjective, but we’re all looking for some concrete 15-word answer to help guide us in finding it. Maybe we need to learn our own definition and then work from there?
What does love mean to you? What is a soul mate? Should love be easy? Should life?