Here is what I thought I knew of the rhythm. A beautiful yet oversimplified story:
First you live in the darkness of negative emotions. Then you are transformed by personal experience and understanding. Finally, you live again, the rest of your life spent under the immortal light of love.
Feelings unfurled within me like butterfly wings in a cocoon.
I loved people and their souls, present or distant, fictional or real. I loved things that people created: books and movies, food and songs.
I loved that the sky took on a new configuration of color every time the sun came up— a more prolific inventor than any human could hope to be, doing so even without the guiding aid of consciousness.
I loved, regardless of time, space, and being.
I loved and I loved and I loved.
I hoped my loneliness had been put away for good, but it was more like an instrument, resting in its case between uses.
Soon returned the wistful song.
I began to cast my solitude as a noble act. I was brave for enduring the loneliness. Full of love in a way that could never quite translate into language or action.
Bearing the weight of my own still silence, I was dramatic. I was tragic. A statue stuck in place but secretly cursed with life.
Confession embarrassed me. Connections slipped through my hands.
I let it all pool behind the dam of myself, redirecting its energy into engagement with my own or another’s art.
This all felt like doing the world a big favor. As if my own heart were an apocalypse. As though the sky would fall into the gravity of my feeling if I did not withhold its enormity from view.
That notion is self-centered and absurd, of course, but I hope it isn’t totally alien to anything you yourself have felt.
Something is knocking on the elaborately locked doors inside us all, right? Doors for which we may not even have the key.
I found something though.
Randomly, I picked up an old, water-damaged copy of Paulo Coelho’s novel By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept for fifty cents. A book I’d never heard of by an author I hadn’t previously read.
I’m only 40 pages through it right now but I stopped to write this letter. 30 pages in, the main character thinks to herself, “I wish I didn’t have to control my heart.”
Then there is this wonderful passage:
Love is much like a dam: if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current. For when the walls come down, then love takes over, and it no longer matters what is possible or impossible; it doesn’t even matter whether we can keep the loved one at our side. To love is to lose control.
Love is a large secret to keep. We discipline ourselves into keeping it hidden.
Maybe it feels misguided to focus on love in the midst of individual or collective human suffering. Maybe love is too fleeting to be worth expressing at all.
Maybe what we thought was love was not in fact love. Maybe we still don’t know if we know what love is.
Why love a sunrise when the sun rises every day? Why love a person who may not want to or be able to love you in return? Why love a life that tirelessly wounds you without warning? Why risk that ultimate loss of control? Why?
My answer today is because you cannot outsmart your life.
Life will call you, again and again, to its rhythm. There is no limit to newness, no shortage of passages in, out, around, and through any feeling.
When I try to outrun love or disregard my own life, even by hiding under cover of negativity, I am caught.
As I insist upon self-isolation, love jumps out at me from the pages of a novel, sneaks in through the back door of my memory.
But loneliness and shame have always been lousy assassins. My beating heart and I laugh in their faces as we watch the rising sun.
Here is what I think I know now of the rhythm. No less beautiful or simple than before:
First you live in the darkness of negative emotions. Then you are transformed by personal experience and understanding. Finally, you live again, the rest of your life spent under the immortal light of love.
Then you are transformed again. Then you live in the darkness again. Then you find yourself grasping at light.
You’re transformed. You understand. You’re transformed. You have a new question. You’re transformed. You understand. You always have.
The rest of your life spent under the immortal light of love.