school of love

This past year has been for me a school of love. One would wish that all the lessons would be of the type "and then they lived happily ever after", but even when they are not, there is so much to be learned.

For instance, I have come to realize that just as beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, love also can reside in the one loving rather than in the object of that love. We love people/things we think are lovable. And, surprisingly, we continue to do so, even when we know that the person/thing in itself is not necessarily good to/for us. For example chocolate: after so many of us are more or less overweight, why do we not forsake this love, and shift it by starting to love carrots the same way? Let alone people...

I found that love is also a habit: once learned, it is almost impossible to unlearn, a bit like riding a bicycle. Granted, we will not all do a tour de France of love, but once you have learned to keep the thing going, you can do it even in the most diverse circumstances, almost as if by an instinct.

What I've learned though that this is not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes the kind of loving I do, or what I think is love showed towards me, might not be that at all, but just because I'm so used to doing it that way, I cease to question its nature. Back to bicycle riding, when my kids were small, I had a hard time concinving them that they could actually ride their bikes even without me holding on or without the training wheels attached to the bike itself. This past year I have started to unlearn the to me self-evident ways of loving and being loved.

I now have a whole new world of love lying ahead of me: so much to unlearn and so much to learn...

pure awesomeness

Last night at the end of our cartoon marathon we watched Kung Fu Panda, a Dreamworks animation movie. There was one phrase that caught my attention, "pure awesomeness".

That got me thinking... maybe that is what we all are (or at least I am) trying to catch with our frantic Christmas preparations and gift-hunting... I can still remember some moments of pure awesomeness from my childhood Christmases and birthdays. There have been other moments too when all of a sudden all of the Universe seems for a moment to have lined up just to make me happy.

As I was reflecting on this, it seems to be like the horizon, you can always go towards it, but you never really get there, because it moves as you move... the perfect moment, the fullness of joy is so fleeting, and we would like to have more, so much more!

Maybe, just maybe, these vanishing moments of pure awesomeness are a signpost, but where are they pointing? And how will I read them?

One thing is sure, to try to hold on to them is like trying stop stars from falling, rivers from flowing, snow from melting in the spring. These moments come with the tag firmly attached to them saying, "this too will pass".

Many realities

I recently visited a place which seems to defy the quest to understand what is going on. The complexities of positions, the lack of shared narratives means that what really is going on is almost beyond capturing.
For a researcher that is very frustrating. But for a human being it brings me right back to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's quote:

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret;
it is only with the heart that one can see rightly,
what is essential is invisible to the eye.
What I saw was often invisible to the eye, but it was shouting louder than any words ever could when listened to with one's heart: I saw mistrust, hope, readiness to try again, sadness and grief, perseverance and courage.
Of course I was as much the observer as the one being observed, and therefore also found myself to be the object of prejudice - a sobering experience!
I hope these lessons will stay with me the next days when I'm faced with more personal aspects of how realities are constructed... beauty and ugliness so often are found in the eye of the beholder!