The General Rules #7 - Finding Fire

One time I wrote this about love,
"To quantify the incalculable.
It's like a fever that rises hot in your cheeks,
before spreading to your chest and then settling
somewhere between terror and bliss."

This is at once terribly wrong and perfectly right.

For all my moments of clarity and logical profundity and clever reversals and rehearsals and recitations about love, at the end of the day I still found myself missing someone. No one in particular. Just someone. And that was the problem. I wanted someone to talk to. I mean really talk to. Someone to understand every reason behind my actions regarding "love." Someone who understood that I was only writing to save my life. This blog was the bastard child of those imagined conversations. The girls came and went and it was hard. And yet, I cannot in good conscience condemn my path up to this point. Could it have gone any different? Any better? It may be a long time before I fully understand all of the milestones on my broken road.

Only when a momentous wave of appreciation and affection finally overtook me could I see the futility, the naivety, the simple presumptuousness of my endeavor. Of all the geniuses and mentors that have gone before, how could I have possibly have been satisfied or happy with my childish conclusions about this thing called love? I vainly thought I had something to offer, or could succeed where all the better people had failed. And failed they have.

I can say this because the things they have described, with their various methods and theories and conclusions, are pale, shivering children compared with what I now feel and know. And I see my own words as hollow figures of unoriginal works. I could barely name what I observed, like a toddler just learning that there are words for the things around him. Trying to describe or quantify the ways and workings of love with those words is like doing brain surgery with a hatchet. Giving "rules" for, and building white fences around a feeling is like trying to cage lightning. Love is elemental. It is a primal force. An unchangeable law of nature. And I will no longer try to compose its abstract.

Because our tools are painfully inadequate for the task, I will stop trying to describe what I observe. This will be the last General Rules post.

But before leaving, I will share a few things that I have recently learned about love's effects and implications. Those things that are quantifiable.

Love is completely a figment of our imaginations. Lest that conjure up a negative connotation, I mean imagination in the best sense of the word. The child-like wonder and creativity and beauty, just because it existed only in your mind and nowhere else, did not make the feelings you felt while imagining any less real. It was real because it was imagined. Our senses can be deceived. They are unreliable. Perceptions rely on the compliance of others, and if love is simply a perception based on logic, it is fallible. Logic may suffice at first, until new information is presented, at which point we must throw out our line of reasoning and start over. Love may make sense on a page. It may seem logical, but it rarely is. How often do we try to anticipate it using our logic and fail miserably? Imagination on the other hand can adapt to any information. It is robust, alive, and constantly in flux. This makes it youthful. If love exists in our imagination, it will never fade. We will never get tired and "fall out of love." I for one want to keep it alive and well and I vow to make it as wonderful as I've always imagined. I realize that those could easily be the words of a deranged stalker, but the difference between being madly in love and being a creepy stalker is only a matter of degrees and semantics.

Love is a choice. Our own prophet hinted at this idea six months ago. "Choose your love. Love your choice." Some think that love is an involuntary, unconscious effect caused an unknown combination of factors. But I am here to tell you that love wants nothing to do with ethereal notions of factors that we label "causes of love." Love has nothing to do with chemistry, humor, attraction, lust, appreciation, social standing, desire (enhanced by "the game"), and thousands of other things that do not matter in the least. Initial attraction may be involuntary, but I ask what initial attraction has ever turned into a full-blown crush without constant conscious dwelling, day-dreaming, and flights of fancy? Does this initial attraction to another person cease once we enter into a monogamous marriage or relationship? Of course not. The only thing that changes is the choice. Before a devoted relationship we nurtured this attraction constantly, and after a relationship begins, we (read:most of us) choose not to indulge it any more. Thus, the initial attraction never grows into anything significant. Love is a choice, but this should not demystify it or destroy any notions of its romantic underpinning. The choice to nurture love is infinitely more romantic than attributing feelings of love to being out of our control. The notion of love being out of our control has arisen from centuries of men rationalizing their affairs to their wives. "I just couldn't help it," is an excuse, not an eternal truth. And it is not love. If love is out of our control in the beginning of a relationship, then it always remains so, and could disappear one morning without explanation. It is a weak replacement for taking responsibility. But if we constantly choose to love then it becomes romantic. It becomes undying.

I know that there is no single "right" person for everyone. I know that there is no such thing as a "soul mate." But I now can see how easily those labels would arise. Because finding someone you can truly choose to love, wholly and completely, makes you feel as if you really have found that person. Finding love simply is a matter of finding someone who you are satisfactorily compatible with. Since true, romantic love is monogamous, that makes you feel as if there is no one else who could possibly compare. Again, this does not undermine love's boundless romanticism. The romantic aspects emerge when you choose that single person to be the object of your undying affection and when you choose to exert all your effort into making that one person happy. And it is romantic that any of us find somebody to love, given the circumstances and chance encounters in our lives. That we find a compatible match in the sea of humanity around us is the biggest miracle I have ever experienced. And it is hopelessly romantic.

If love is imagined and if it's a choice, maybe we make our own soul mates.

That is what I have learned. And it has fundamentally changed me. I found her. I found fire.

[Keep Following.]