Love, a mystery through the ages ~ JJ @omojuwa

09 Jul, 2012

As old as man, as mysterious as his thoughts. As soothing as the calm that comes with sharing it with the one your soul desires, like balm for every point of pain. Flip it and it becomes the source of many wars, the path to the underworld and the word that plays through the brain of many broken hearts who have found shelter in psychiatric homes. That same Love is the cord that joins many hearts together. Love has its many parts. While it is what keeps some hearts going, it is the reason some others don’t want to live anymore.
Often mistaken for a lot of other passions, including infatuation and even hatred, Love remains an enigma even in the age of incessant technological possibilities. I bet you’d wonder how Love could be mistaken for hatred. Have you ever wondered why two people who seemingly hated each other ended up having the best union? Sometimes Love mirages as hatred. You think you hate someone and you express it with so much vigour and passion, only for you to discover one or two things about the person and the passion takes a different hue. It expresses itself, as it always was in your heart even when you did not realise it. You discover you are in love even when it had always been there to be nurtured.
Of all that has been said and written about Love, few come as ironic as what I call the shadow of Love. We ignore those who desire us and desire those who ignore us. We love even more those who hurt us and are often bent on hurting those who love us. We run after those who’d run far away from us and run far away from those who run after us. We are desperate to have those that’d rather have other people, and are more desperate to have other people than have those that want us so much. Love plays around like a shadow that can be seen and even admired but never to be touched or even had. Most times we are in an endless cause of chasing shadows, thinking we are almost at the point of touching Love, but never to truly have it.
This brings about a chain of broken hearts and broken homes. We love today and tomorrow the love seemingly sags when we suddenly realise we love another. I may not know all about love but I know enough to conclude that there can be no love without sacrifice. You can’t claim to love someone until you can firmly conclude that you can and will sacrifice desires that contrast with your love for that whom you claim to love.
You will never have the most beautiful woman as wife, because some day beauty loses colour and soon fades, and soon you are back on the road chasing another woman. It often comes to me as strange, when men have beauty as top of their priority in choosing a wife. You desire the most beautiful woman, forgetting that the true beauty of a woman lies in her heart. She is not beautiful a woman if she does not possess a beautiful heart. Miss out on that and you miss out on everything. The beauty of the body soon fades, but that of the heart is immortal. It survives death because as the evil that men do lives after them, the good they showed leaves the world with them and also survives them.
It may come across as many things but despite its seeming mystery, Love is simple enough. It takes faith to Love. It takes faith to decide that, despite the glut of beauties in the world, once you decide for one, it will be that and that alone. If all that keeps you in love is the beauty you see, then in time the absence of it will keep you out of it.
Find a reason beyond what is seen, find the path to the heart of the one you love and discover the power of Love. If Love is not seen but felt, what makes you think what you see is what will keep your love going. Love may be a mystery, but if your heart of understanding is receptive to the truth, you will find that Love thrives on the mystery of Faith. What then is Faith? While you ponder on that, let me help your imagination by saying there would be no need for Faith in the midst of certainty. Faith exists because of uncertainty. Being certain of what is uncertain. This is the true essence of Faith, and it is where Love derives its essence, not on the certainty of a transient physical beauty that soon fades away.
I thank God for my physical beauty but I thank Him even more for the beauty of my heart. That is the essence of me and whoever discovers that discovers me. That is the path to demystifying the seeming Mystery of Love.
PS: Published in my Facebook Notes, May, 2010

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