NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING

As a child I used to adore my cousin. She was very kind and loving. A few years later when I met her, I did not see in her those things that I so easily appreciated. Did she lose those things? Had she got corrupted by the trials of life? My conclusion simply was: I do not find in you those things that made me love you so much. If this is my conclusion then the next logical conclusion is: and so I cannot love you now.

This is the predicament many of us put ourselves in. we do not understand how love works. We enjoy how love feels. We don’t really enjoy love. Most of our lives we are motivated by how we feel and because love gushes in feelings we say “love binds us together”. Once the feeling is gone we shallowly say, “I don’t think I love you anymore” whereas what is really wrong is you never really loved the person [perfectly] but only loved what you felt while you thought (or really did, I don’t discredit) you were loving the person.

Name. A simple analogy is of a friend. It is the bond of friendship that keeps two people together. We confuse many things when we decide what really got us into befriending a person let alone what will encourage us to continue endearing the person. For example, if I you are asked what do you like in ‘X’ and you make the mistake of saying because X is honest and kind. If tomorrow X ceases to be honest and kind, do you then cease to be a friend of X? Your friendship is not a bond rather it is a pursuit.

You pursue honesty and kindness in X and because you feel strongly about them it attracts you towards X. what if after many years X evolves and the fuel that his honesty and kindness powered your relationship with is falling short? It is better if we define friendship by love and not “names”. So that when someone tells you ‘rickson’, you do not remember a manifesto or a common minimum program which you signed with him to be friends until upheld. What if you cling too hard on the manifesto and your friend has changed for the better and you are still reluctant to grow.

I have often heard so many of my friends say: you have changed so much. Perhaps what they are saying subtly is, “I don’t think I can relate to you the way I used to and because you have so abruptly and drastically changed, you are not the same person to me and I may feel it rather uncomfortable to share the same things I used to. So our friendship will never be the same again”

Place. Instead of finding a place in my friends heart, may be my friend only fell in love with certain traits I had years back. He may have found those traits very convenient or beneficial to his well-being. Now if I have adopted different ideologies and world-views, and when he remembers the “name”-Rickson, he just does not find it in him to love me because he cannot find it in me the traits that he did before. Friendship then really is making a place for a person in your life.

I have a friend I often meet and enjoy spending time with. But I do not find myself as concerned about him as I do with other friends. I realized this is because I like this friend because he is very intellectual and a thinker. Again, I am making a mistake of only pursuing in him traits that I appreciate. He is truly my friend when I make a place for him in my heart. This has nothing to do with traits. This has everything to do with love. If he gets twice as smart in a year, it may motivate me to spend more time with him.

Is that friendship or just I pursuing things according to my preferences and tastes? Will his doubly smartness develop a concern in my life if I get to know he has experienced a crisis or setback in his life? Where will my concern arise from? Where will I find suffering in me to be in communion with his suffering so that his cross can feel lighter? Can my appreciation of traits find me suffering for him? I doubt. Appreciation of each others traits is just the beginning of beginnings. If you do not take it farther than that, you may be just pursuing your own self through others.

Animal. What separates man and Animal is rationale. Man is a rational Animal. Giraffes often have sex if they are tensed or intimidated. They are not rational creatures and they cannot think or introspect or deal with situations. They do as they feel; they push if they are pulled. They run if they are chased. They attack if they are invaded. We humans think a lot. Often we think so much, it crosses the line into scheming. We scheme and conspire, plan and judge. Something we hear quite typically about marriage is: Before marriage he was so adorable and impressive. After 20 years he is a different person. Most of the people end up saying: I don’t know what went wrong. We both changed so much.

Change is here to stay. Change is the most unchangeable thing. It is the only constant and permanent thing in life. Thus we should have more respect for an individual who we enter into a relationship with than change demands. We should have respect solely for the sake of love and not change. Change is reality, love is a choice. All of us are influenced by different things. If you have stayed with your wife for 30 years, how come both of you’ll haven’t got adjusted and exposed to the same things to such an extent that both of you’ll find yourselves successfully compatible? What is the cause of fights then, as friends have things in common are very compatible. This is the basis of fraternities in colleges.

We have to remember -I love the person now. His traits, that I fell in love with, were a lure towards the river. Now the river itself has to lure me. I do not need to look at the shimmering light on the river water or the comforting greens beside it. The river itself has to quench me. We cannot scheme or reason now. We have to lose rationale¹ like animals and love the person as someone whose traits give him an identity. It would be amusing to think we love traits which are housed by a body of a person.

Things. I am not so idealistic to think that we should be incapable of loving things in people and only love the person. Countrymen make the country. Students make the school. A man is what his ideologies are. But this is the difference pursuits and love. Our pursuits are according to our ideologies. But love surpasses pursuits.

It is a choice to love someone unconditionally or at least that loving this person has no agenda others than what loving will achieve: the hope of making a world for another person through you. You do not get to choose what your brother or sister will be like, do you? What happens to ideologies then? We are lost for choices to bond. Only love remains…

1. By saying, one has to lose rationale; I did not mean you should not bother to question why you love the person until you continue doing. St. Thomas Aquinas says the origin of love is our affections and emotions and our reason. Love is emotional when the person concerned is unable to live without the object of his love and it is governed by the dictate of reason when the person lives what he grasps with is mind. We should love in both these ways, with our will and with a heart. From the emotional and sentimental points of view we realize how much we ourselves need help, protection, affection and happiness. At times these very deep feeling can and should be a channeled for seeking the people we love: friends, lovers, mothers, brothers and sisters for telling them we truly love them. If our actions were the result only of cold and rational choices, or if we tried to ignore the affective side of our being, we wouldn’t be living our human life to the full. At times, we may perhaps feel cold and listless with our heart unresponsive, our feelings fluctuating unpredictably. We shouldn’t then make do with the feeling of following love unwillingly like swallowing an unpalatable medicine. (IN CONVERSATION WITH GOD 4, ORDINARY TIME, WITH ALL OUR HEART)