LOVE SUSTAINABILITY Vs. SUSTAINABLE LOVE

Recently I had an unplanned encounter with a beautiful married couple exploring some shocking facts about their married life, it felt that the dust of time has faded the spark between them and they are just carrying the corpus of their relationship on their shoulders. At the beginning of the married life, they vowed about spending a splendid life together and with the passage of time and coping with the turbulence of the married life, relationships, relatives, social obligations and need for survival has eaten up all the juices and dreams they had seen together. A life which they aspired to be living hand in hand is lost somewhere and now remains the ruins of a relationship that have pillars engraved marriage on it but no signs of life within. Unfortunately, this is not the scenario with the married couples only in the similar fashion the teenagers falling in the beautiful province of Love and affection by just seeing each other on their first encounter at places exposed for easy realization of the feeling of liking, love, lust, and association like colleges, institutes, marriage function, social gatherings, offices, etc., are not an exception to the fact. Everything starts with the rosy pictures of love, ecstasy and perfectionism moving towards a dream world but soon they get into the trap of controlling each other on the name of love and emotions. Acceptance of a relationship that was lovely initially doesn’t generate similar tastes and emotions. It all happens for a reason that what seems Love for one is generally not love for both. Love is a broader term and needs to be seen with the ability to sustain in the long term. What is Love Sustainability and What is Sustainable Love? These are very big questions that keep on banging in my mind often. 

 Is there something like Sustainable Love that exists or it’s just the physical or mental pleasures that keep two bodied tied together for some duration and the moment one loses its degree, sustainability starts losing it’s the place. “Love Sustainability is a definition based on efforts of carrying a relationship whereas Sustainable Love is a verb, which is based on the natural principals of action and being free from possessions”. Love sustainability is the situation that can be achieved by being there for someone you care and respect either due to, choice, situation, circumstances or by chance but it requires a different level of a journey to be traveled from one sphere to another to reach the level of Sustainable love. Efforts can help you sustain the love for longer duration as a result of the power of association and social obligation and you can live a peaceful yet juiceless life. Whereas there is something which is more powerful, an association which is based on understanding, knowing, accepting the individual, being the guiding and motivating force for the partner and remaining partners in expectations, dreams, sorrows, happiness, adventures, mistakes and crimes and being ready to let go the person for one’s choice and life, which in turn reflects the acceptance of being human and being flawsome and yet being admired, accepted, appreciated and promoted always. Sustainable love gives you freedom and assurance of being there irrespective of time, place, situation, adversities and foundation. It is a bird flying high in the sky of emotions, trust, belief, expectations, and contentment. Feeling like one particular love that goes on beyond everything. The one in which I was and I am loved back. Profusely, passionately, with no restraint. Not for weeks, or months but years. The one where you’re loved just so much that when love ends, you don’t know if and how to live anymore. The one where you believe everything will be just alright only if you’re with the person but the person stops feeling that way as time passes. The one where love stays with one foot out, eager to wear shoes and run out as soon as the opportunity presents itself. And then one day, it does so. After crying foul, you accept. You let the love go, you set it free. Only to find out that it doesn’t really want to leave, it never wanted to, it just wanted to let go of your hold because your hold was suffocating it. Now it’s free, free not from you, but free to love you like the way it wants to. You find it hard to accept. It’s easier to accept departure than accepting the return, especially when it’s not returning to you the way you want. But you have no choice. You have started liking this free body that your love has become, floating in space, loving you in ways you didn’t know it could, loving you in ways you didn’t think you deserved. It’s a cosmic shower, No need for an umbrella.

  Loneliness into Solitude

 LONELINESS is akin to being swallowed by a swamp. You keep sinking deeper and deeper, and the weight above you only increases. You do not find a floor to gather yourself and stand up, to emerge. You let yourself be absorbed. 

This loneliness is worse than that of a beloved deserting you. It’s like finding out that the beloved is there but has never been in love with you. The heart stops for a moment. You don’t even feel the pain because it’s all over you, the skipping beat, the curled toes, the scrunched up lines on your forehead. The breaths are as short as a second count. Time has lost its significance. You are suspended, from functioning, from living, from the world. Just the weight increases as you keep sinking...

I am questioning everything — why people choose to get married, have kids, go to work, be at home, buy a house, travel and there’s no conclusive answer I can arrive at. Everything seems to be irrational. Is it what they call nihilism? Or am I going through an existential crisis — last felt in M. A psychology exam when I was completely unprepared for an exam on the same day? That existential crisis got over the moment I finished my examination. What about this one, when there’s no exam waiting with a sledgehammer for me?

Loneliness: a word as thick as it sounds. I am happy that they didn’t choose a smaller word to describe this feeling. Imagine, what if a word like boredom would have described this state. It would be so inept. It doesn’t hold the weight that the word loneliness carries. Loneliness, the L sitting and looking back at what’s behind it, unable to carry it any further. The word seems to have given up. Like a father looking at his dying child. Like a coach looking at their protégé stumbling in their last attempt at the race of their dreams. Like a lover, in a relationship, out of love. Only the word loneliness could appropriately describe the meaning it holds within. No amount of description can fill in.

Hoping tomorrow will be a better day. Tomorrow, what a beautiful word! To me, it looks like a truck with wheels embedded moving so fast that I can’t catch up. It looks like motion. I think I should start my journey. I’m sinking in the comfort and clutches of not moving. Moving is the only way to not sink. Today, as I pack my bags to leave, I want to share a quote that I once wrote but finding it difficult to practice today: ‘You are not creative until you know how to turn your loneliness into solitude.’ .. . ..