The point of it all
Momentary contact
I loved someone. I still feel trace amounts of love for that someone. We are no longer in contact. Silence lightens the memories you hold. It has been years since then. But late afternoon, as the grey clouds moved in, and the cold wet air came across the field I was in, I thought of her.
I thought of her and myself, who we may or may not have been. Only a fleeting thought, as if known from an instinct within. I thought about where I am and how much of this perspective would we have had, if we had stayed the course.
As if that is even the point of it all. As if love is the result of having stayed a course, or could it have been something natural. And so it ends and there’s its end. Some of what we could be missing, and some of what we would have never found. "You’ll miss the best parts," is what we said. The "hard-won truth" I read, and knew it were the reward for having battled. And like life itself, some things never work out the way you had it imagined.
If there is no point to it all, and all we do is live to experience our own personal existence, then perhaps love is just something we built in imagination, for momentary contact - external inspiration. But if there is a point to it all, could it be as simple as love?
Let’s say that what I feel out here makes a difference. Some fraction, a version of happiness I remembered – in my future – an extension of our shared worlds in existence. If we had not let go, if we had not thrust each other off with such violence. Because far too often we live our lives half unaware.
Perhaps we would have never gotten here. But what if the purpose of our lives is as simple as being known. As if somewhere someone can, in the cells within their existence, know, that they are cared for – existence shared – without a word lost or transferred.
What if we could feel it, somewhere in our life. If we tap into it. That although there is no going back. Every experience in life. Whatever the hardship.
I had been building a woven wooden fence. Crisscrossing willow branches for a garden. I paused in the growing mist, watched a version of myself I had forgotten. I took a breath, in, that moment.
Alternate reality scanned.
And that's enough at times, just to know what you are looking at.
Glad to have known. And then the thought of all love, built out of our instincts for survival, or loftier, inexplicable when understood. And I thought perhaps the grand scheme of all existence is simply to be known, which is love. The grand object to this game, were there something to be won, is to pass compassion and understanding around, wisely, so as not to be taken for granted or mistaken for weakness.
More deeply the question is: Why do we have that trait, current in all animals for survival? Love, as if a gene to project us forward in evolution. Because if it weren’t of use nature would have had it discarded.
Love; the feeling that reveals that which is of our personal importance; our very own universe builder; what we are magnetized to by code of natural attraction; the core of our design and growing machines.
Like a game of hide and seek, where some things are only found in silence, far in the distance.
