i have decided on my understanding of love. it is this.
love is caring about (someone, something, someplace) as much as you like (them, it, him, her).
this definition (well, loosely speaking it may be called a "definition") may seem spurious in the sense that a person's liking or disliking tends to vary (and understandably so) according with circumstance. so, a child may well dislike his parent when he is scolded for dropping his apple. are we then to understand that the child no longer loves his parent? no. but for my purposes, i believe i need not provide the most exact phrasing (exceptions and all) of how i understand love, so long as you understand that by "like", i mean a deeper sense of "liking" than passing emotion. a dropped apple leads to chagrin for all, but the child still understands that the apple (and the reproach) was handed over in fondness.
as i thought about it (and obviously about my love), i had this fleeting, tremendous shiver through my frame as i thought about when (and how much) i cared for you.
it is so hard to move on, it's funny in a way. you and the loss of you have become something that is always with me, a bit like a shadow. i don't know whether i drag this shadow or whether it is just a sort of material that is me in a different way. peter pan tried to re-fix his shadow with a bar of soap. so the idea is not quite heresy or nekulturny (which means loosely, uncultured). in the book, wendy fixed it by sewing it back to him. to his foot!
as an aside, i love peter pan. in a way, peter pan, alice in wonderland, the little prince, these books are a lot more important than we realise.
the problem with men is that we are, i would say, characteristically good at liking someone or something without caring for them (or it). this is, of course, among other things, men going to ktvs. we do. we are men. in a way, we have to say for ourselves what is or is not in accord with our own moral compass. no one can (and indeed, no one should) intervene at these moments of maturity. so much for ktvs. in a word, they are fun. it's true. fun tends to excess, that is also true. and so, moral compass, gentlemen, moral compass. also, negative externalities. as phil jackson once said, paraphrasing, as a basketball player, one must learn to have compassion for the opponent as well as for oneself.
love! it seems simple enough! i leave you with an anecdote. one of the things i remember about an interview will smith did was when he was asked about his marriage of seventeen years. he said he had to work at it and improve himself, sacrifices things, etc. continuing, he also said that he estimated his record to be 15-2. so out of that seventeen years, he considered that he had two losing seasons. i mean, to me, that's a wonderful record, but to lose in those two years, that's also something else. who can say that, though, to look back at x years and say, i'm fifteen and two. goodness, that's fantastic, and also scary.
so that's "love".
