We see the amazing everyday beauty that surrounds us. We drive around with its loveliness in everyday life, but we are missing the magnificent, radiant colours of love outside the window of life. People go crazy proclaiming love for their loved ones on Valentine’s Day, but putting aside all the so-called commercial hype, do we really understand what kind of love is going on here?
Drama or romance
Pre-dawn de-icing the car kind of love? What is this love? Well, it is just a small kindness unheralded on the ordinary days. Though I am not sure I realised it or not until I could feel its absence, but trying to elope from the flimsy threads of drama and romance. The most common and loving thing seen in few fathers doing for their wives is getting up before dawn in the permafrost to warm up his wife’s car for the drive to work. So this is what usually fathers do for her on minus-five-degree days when she had to be at work before 7am.
Art of loving
I do not want my life starting with a rapacious meeting love-of-the-life in the middle of nowhere and the love recipe of no real longevity. A philosopher from the art of living writes: ‘Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love.’ We do not dig to learn how to be loved and how to be lovable, failing to believe that loving isn’t a skill developed, like playing the piano or learning to cook.
Universe – the dating app
The so-called dating app ‘universe’ rigged to reward the creative ability of the lovable avatar of you. So instead of trying to learn how to love, most of us are fixated on how to attract love or trying to validate that you are lovable, which otherwise means bottomless and obsessively addictive. Stop thinking of love as a goal or a reward. Stop thinking of it as a verb, a habit, or making coffee for the one who needs it in the morning, by not making ‘it’ the everyday practice of loving.
Esther or vinegar price
Practice to make love easier and not a strain on your heart. Practising love isn’t getting the muscle stronger to withstand things that would break a less practised heart, but learning the love. Find beauty in everyday life. Looking for the sun and the delightful time of watching the only flower standing strong, completely undisturbed, is nothing but a peaceful presence of contentment. Rather than being Esther Howland, mother of Valentine’s or a day called Vinegar Valentines to share and send nasty anonymous cards to someone you don’t like.
By the time we will be able to realise the patch of love driveway, being unbearably frigid, a little bit of warmth would unfurl the rays of hope with either hate or lusty feelings under the scorching sunburnt heat out of the umbrella.
Don’t ever think I fell for you or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.
Jashan Jot Kaur is a researcher at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana.
