on love and difficulty

When you’re a kid and you get a job dog-sitting, or your family takes a visit to the local animal shelter, you’re told not to get attached. You’re told not to get attached to one dog in particular because you can’t keep it, you can’t take it home, or you can’t get a dog yet. Or something like that anyway. Something appeasing. You’re appeased so you don’t cause a scene or whine to your parents for 3 weeks about why you HAVE to have THAT dog. But you’re really being told not to fall in love. You’re told to guard yourself, protect yourself from heartache. Protect yourself from the heartache of lost ice cream cones, stolen toys, no more trips to the amusement park, not having that shiny gold bike, loosing your purple shoes, or that unfulfilled crush in high school. By the time you’re an adult you have a strongly built protective wall around you. You apply for a job, but don’t get too excited or attached to the idea just in case. You find a new apartment, but don’t expect much when you turn in the application just in case that old boss gives you a bad reference. You meet a cute boy/girl and don’t let yourself think past flirtation because it probably won’t work out. And if you get your dog, it’s usually after research into breeds, approval from your landlord, and any other precautions taken.

Of course this isn’t always, and many people still do spontaneous things, and many things probably shouldn’t be done spontaneously. But by the time most people reach adulthood, they’re well trained as to the dangers of the heart. Love makes everything more. Things can happen to something you love and it makes your emotions and attention start swinging on a pendulum of passion. Things can happen to something that you don’t love, and even if you like it a lot you can react objectively. Looking through love, everything you see is more intense, and your whole body can feel what your heart or gut might just hint at.

When I was a kid I never remember minding moving. I don’t remember even once thinking that I wish we didn’t have to move. I don’t remember once wondering why we had to move. By my teens my ability to move myself within 3 days, no help needed, in only my sporty jeep was more than something I was proud of. It was a part of who I was and how I identified myself. But until I was 20 I never loved a place I’d been. I had a brief torrid affair with England, but with the brief kind of passion that can only come from something you know isn’t really real, and more adventure than anything else.

I’ve loved two places since then, one I live in still. But living in this place, this area, this state, makes everything more. My joy is limitless, the beauty is the closest thing to spirit I’ve ever found, but the frustrations are nearly heartbreaking. So as each day throws me on the pendulum of emotion, swinging me this way and that, it’s only through commitment that I center myself. Like any longer love, things are never perfect, especially as they become more and more familiar. But the passion remains. Maybe some days it remains only in frustration or anger. But if I walk through each day intending to be here still, I can move that pendulum back to joy and perfection. While the intensified frustration and anger is sometimes enough to make me flee, for now it’s worth sticking around for the other end of the pendulum swing. For life is so full of questions and unknowns, that when you find the place with the air that when you breath it deep into your lungs gives your body the stillness it needs to look for the answers, it’s worth the stay.