Tricky Thing

Love's a tricky thing.

It can build you up, tear you down, make you do both great and terrible things, can be fleeting, eternal, unrequited. . . you get the idea. We can love things, ideas, people, pets, anything in our life. We can love a feeling we get being around certain people, and amazingly we can do that without necessarily loving the people involved.

It's complicated and messy; it's so very messy. One little thing can set a whole series of events careening out of control or down a road we never intended. No two people love in the same way; some feel deeply, some more superficially, some fleetingly, some eternally. Hence the messy: most people assume that others are going to experience feelings in a similar way (not necessarily similar feelings), and misunderstandings occur based on those assumptions. People get hurt, relationships get twisted, and we get to rifle through the aftermath to try to salvage or refurbish what's left.

Or not. Because there will always be those situations that can in no form be recovered.

In this. . . whatever you want to call it, the farce that is life, we encounter so many other lives. We meet people that will forever change us, for better or worse, and some of them will play a role for years. They may be friends, lovers, rivals, arch-nemeses ('cause those are things people have. . .); we may love them, we may like them, we may hate them. It's like a puzzle: picking the right pieces to put together the right way to make our life what we want it to be.

And that's why love's a tricky thing, because you don't choose the people you love. That kind of just happens. I met one of my best friends 9 years ago; I love her dearly and would gladly throw myself in harms way to protect her. As I would with so many of my friends: to me that is love. But I didn't meet these people intending for this to happen. You can't; you can only surround yourself with people you enjoy, and if you're truly lucky you'll find friendship or romantic love.

So leave yourself open to it, roll with the punches that will inevitably come, and be happy. To me this is a crucial aspect in the constant search for the steeper side of life.