Of Love & Loneliness

There is a lot with it, in between and after.

These two words are intriguing. They both are very personal. Not because they are intimate experiences, but because they are never understood by anyone else the way you understand them. Love and loneliness are perhaps the most distorted and misunderstood emotions to someone not living them. Something that you could say about these two words could also be negated with something opposite to the said. It only depends where one stands in the gravity of the subject.

Love becomes a laugh to those who have been there and done that, unsuccessfully. Love is a joke to those who are too narcissistic to admit a falling, even in love. Love could be a response to a biological forecast or an aberration often made in excitement. Love is always a phase they say. A phase when gone wrong, crushes you, gently, bit by bit. Love is a season that matures a part of you, only to last for a while, until it changes you again. Love is several other things interpreted by perspectives alone.

Love and loneliness are often entangled into one another. In the vacuum of being, love tends to get its space. But when love leaves, the void returns. Loneliness is never acknowledged as it is defined, before love takes over. You are alone and not lonely then. Love fills up the emptiness. And usually, you are only lonely than alone when love leaves. Predominantly, in pursuit of love somewhere we find loneliness. Somewhere, we only hallucinate a paradise, which in reality is a graveyard.

With love comes self-recognition. A sense of being accepted, acknowledged by another entity who gives meaning to your existence. Your most innate assertions are recognized. However, when the same idea of self-recognition becomes social-recognition, you identify yourself differently from what you were. You prioritize your societal stand. The superficial affiliation with your society that you once abandoned, now makes you pretentious. You were something to someone. But now you are someone to something.

Loneliness is a consequence of one’s choice that may have been inflicted on another. Seldom approved, it is the misery of mankind, a punishment sentenced for an involuntary offence. It is a labyrinth that you enter to find the lost and often on exit losing your self more. Loneliness may not be a direct byproduct of love. But is the hardest adversity one could associate with it.

There is something disturbing about nuances of love and loneliness. The sand underneath tickles your feet, as you stand firm on the shore waiting for the tide to come and give you the sense of belonging in this world. And then there is this experience when you stand there, the sediments prick the bottom of your feet and the tide returns to the sea, even before touching your toes. And that’s when you realize; loneliness has its own ways.

It is difficult to understand why there comes a point that traps rationale, deserts reasoning, and demeans every sentiment that formed the relationship. Why do those who celebrate love, build a wall against it? All the time they invest in putting together the finest moments of togetherness, constructing a foundation that liberates them of any identity but of love then choose to breakdown this constitution and later grieve in the debris of memories. Some find new love, some choose to forget for their own objectives, some fall prey to obligations, some choose those obligations to escape, compulsions are many in the eternal order of things. But never they liberate you from the continuous anxiety inflicted on conscience.

This is a far greater threat to mankind than nuclear wars. Because this is instructed within a culture, by a society. When all that we read, all that we study, all this education, this civility, this learning for years is forgotten. Why does it become so easy to be numb over the most beautiful feeling that love brought us to? Why do they make love a luxury when it is the most natural and the greatest form of freedom? Why are we growing accustomed to surrender to social disabilities? Why do we do the most preposterous act of designating one’s life with another when it has to be chosen by them, for them, freely?

The greatest stories of love are the ones that have defeated the norms of greatness being in not achieving the love. Where is the greatness in losing someone you loved? It’s an ordinary belief that an individual’s principles are misdeeds. But if an entire community does the same, it is of righteousness. I believe some day; a generation will place their hearts over their minds and believe in the reason why the heart must beat before the mind should think.

Someday all that will be answered, that has been escaping forever. Every reason will be put to justice, will be articulated, expressed staring in the eyes of the civilization that has been committing and abetting this crime. One day we will know why we slay the sheep in the name of love and also why we slay the love becoming sheep. Some day we will know if the monks abstain by choice or by burden. Someday we will know if their robe wants to flutter in the wilderness of the wind or wrap them in solitude of exile.

One day we will fearlessly uphold love over religion, faith, dogma, profession, theology, or any obligation whatsoever as a primary duty towards love itself. There have been a thousand promises broken, a thousand hearts split, a thousand agreements forgotten, in fear of a society that calls it blasphemous, something it doesn’t understand. And in this sinful hostility, depriving mankind of its kindness, love in its sanctity dies a silent death.

We are the murderers of love. With our own ignorance, we subjugated mankind to an eternal suffering. This suffering that cultivates the seed to loneliness. When he embraces love as a blessing, you convince him of a curse. We don’t realize that breaking someone’s heart is as barbaric as killing someone. You not only take away a man’s hope, but you reduce his conviction to mere superstition.

We have nurtured this society too seriously, giving importance to its fraudulent ideas of fraternity. These falsified ideas of togetherness don’t stay forever. They change the moment their minds like doors are closed. The world, however great and wonderful we might think of it is, but in its covert, clandestine self, it is weak. We live in an impotent society that passes its ignorant infertility by ways of paralyzed patriarchy, barren religious ideas and corrupt civic codes of conduct. And then what you get is a helpless generation, incompetent by birth.

Buddha’s teachings became fancy utterances and him a collector’s item that decorated walls but minds. Rumi lives on social media walls but dies every time when those who celebrate him, become complacent about their surrendered existence. Manto becomes a rebellious fashion outside, by those who cannot even utter love openly in their homes. This society is undeserving, unworthy of a legacy of these legends who have extended and worshiped love and freedom beyond faith and circumstance.

I have nothing more to say. But just that mankind still has to learn, to love.

 

Of love & loneliness happens to be my 100th post today. I started writing some 8 years ago, incessantly reasoning with my understanding of things. I know I have never been that easy to read, but I didn’t know how else to write. But I only hope, with my tiny little contribution, I could add some substance to the society.

I thank you all for your time and the recognition you have given me. Thank you all for your emails, comments and acknowledgments. My only desire is to a see a rational, happy, free world some day. Love may be a very ordinary thing today to talk about. But I wonder how ordinary it is considering the 7.5 billion people in the world existing at once, probably in the name of love. 

 

 

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