"When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But it is! "
I need to say something about this. Yes, Love is what is left over. When the "real" work has to be done.Let´s say that each person you meet, or a relationship you have is a piece of arable land where you see a possibility to cultivate something. At a certain stage in our lives, we already know what we´d want to have in a piece of land. Through all our lives we can visit many pieces of land, or just a few, while we find the one we really like, and when we find the one we like and want, we spend some time looking at its beauty admiring its quality, imagining how what we could cultivate would look at the end, or imagining how the house we´d like to live in would be. How it would be distributed and organised and we have an ideal of the piece of land we´d want to have. We are happy and go every day to see it and make plans for what we want to have there. We tell people how happy we are because we found " the piece of land we´ve always wanted".
We can do many things to "get" this piece of land for us. We go there, see the land, we go during the day, and we see that it´s beautiful, we go in the nights and we see that it´s beautiful. And after a period of time, when we see the land in detail, we see that it´s got some flaws, like the big trees near the river, because we´d want them to be smaller so we could have a better view for example... but of course we know that there is not a "perfect or flawless" piece of land, that most of the pieces of land have both beautiful and not so beautiful things, and we still like it and want it as a "whole", because there are more things that we like and a few we don´t. So we know it´s worth to have that piece of land we like so much.
So we want it and we like it, fine! That´s a first step. But sometimes when we finally have it and we see that there is work to do, we say, uhm... maybe I don´t want to work on it. And say, "oh well, I´ll just get another piece of land where I don´t have to work a lot, I´m kind of tired of working in my projects and I don´t have time for an " extra work", I´ll just get another one.
What we seldom keep in mind is that there is work to do in any piece of land that we get. But also we have to bear in mind that there really is the perfect piece of land for us. The one we´ll work on with all our effort and all our heart and the one that will give us the satisfaction we want.
There is not a magical fertilizer that works every day for us or a magical machine that will relieve us from what we need to do. For the crops to be able to grow, we first have to work on the soil. Then sow the seeds, put water on them frequently, find good minerals and fertilizers. We must take out the unwanted plants continuously. We must find the materials for the house and build it step by step. If we really want to have a beautiful piece of land, we must work on it. As any other farmer would. Also the results can not be seen in one week. The seeds need time to grow.
Some of us might never get to see the fulfilling results of what our work could give, because we give up on each piece of land we get when we see "how much effort, work, perseverance and patience has to be put". Or because we think that there is a piece of land that will not require much effort or work. But we still long for a " beautiful piece of land"...
I think I finally understood how much effort, work, perseverance, passion and patience has to be put in order to Love somebody take care and mantain a relationship. What my part of the work would be. I know it will be fun sometimes it will be the opposite others... but it is work what has to be done. Action that has to be taken. It is a day to day effort that surely will give the results. I´m not a quitter and I am not lazy. So I believe I have reached the next step.
October 2008
