Weight of Love: Delights of The Ordinary No.43 (S2)
Love is such a weight but inch by inch it weirdly becomes the most powerful thing in us. That weight, that eventually will feel lighter.
Delights of the Ordinary is for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone. This newsletter intersects culture, art and our practical 9-5 job space.
“Isn’t that brilliant. What a life my old friend. We are so much more than a trodden clod, I’m telling you.”
- Companion Piece by Ali Smith
Some weights are good.
They are natural, lighter, brighter and squeaky clean, like how Lillies are to white, that they do such absolute magnanimous good in us to outweigh the entire damage inside us.
Like weights in the gym!
When you first start doing the gym even an ounce of a dumbbell will feel like lifting an enormous mountain. Yet in time, your muscles are beefy and buffed and you mightier; from holding a mini-size dumbbell to hefty-fatty weights; like lifting a mountain but with ease!
These weights are good.
Like love! Like loyal love!
Christian Winman in his book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer writes, “In any true love — a mother’s for her child, a husband’s for his wife, a friend’s for a friend — there is an excess energy that always wants to be in motion. Moreover, it seems to move not simply from one person to another but through them, toward something else…”
In any form of love, there will be some kind of weight that is meant to break our muscular fibres first, then inch by inch re-assemble them, but this time it will be more impressive than before. In much of matters today we leave the gym way too soon; abandon lifting weights too quickly; give up loving others too soon and eventually become harder way too soon, too young!
“Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
―C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
What is love?
According to the Basic Emotion Theory, love is not an emotion or a feeling. Thomas Dixon, PhD, a historian of emotions at Queen Mary University of London (yes, there is a subject like this to study) says, “Over the centuries, opinions about love have changed, but for many thinkers it has been too complex, too multifaceted, or perhaps even too fundamental to take its place alongside anger, fear, and the rest as an everyday human “emotion.”
Our everyday emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger and surprise. Love is not one of them. In psychology, “…one of the reasons it has only rarely been considered an “emotion” is that love is hard to study experimentally.”
In some way, when experiments cannot explain love, all those who have handled hearts have explained it through poetry and language. In other ways, love is experiential knowledge rather than experimental lab-driven knowledge.
The truth is love is our weight to carry on us and it will someday become lighter. Lighter than a ball of snow, lighter than a feather, and yet it will be the strongest of things we can enclose in our hearts. And then with time love becomes so much elaborately intricate, a sort of weaved pattern in the laces; like prints of the dandelions; like a lush buttery breeze; then like a slow swing; then still like large waves of the ocean.
“There is a sense in which love’s truth is proved by its end, by what it becomes in us, and what we, by virtue of love, become. But love, like faith, occurs in the innermost recesses of a person’s spirit, and we can see only inward in this regard, and not very clearly.”
- Christian Wiman
So how do we manoeuvre this love in our real life?
Because people are not always pleasant. Our loved ones are difficult. We are not living in a fairy tale land and neither life is a fantasy. Over all of this, we are constrained into the mercenaries of our everyday action-packed mornings where none of us has any time to even smile wide, let alone love and carry its weight around!
I have had my days sometimes in such a swirling wind of sadness and gloom that every morning appeared like a weight. But the only way and not the simplest way is to bring back our life’s bigger picture to the fore.
What are you doing it for? Who are the beneficiaries of you toiling in the office or waking up early in the morning? Who waits for you when you return home? Who breaks your heart ten times but warmly fixes it together a million times? Who are you doing it for?
Chances are that you are doing it for love, in love, for someone or some of the many.
Cling on to that bigger picture tightly imprinting it in your bosom as many times as it is needed and then hang in there and stop at nothing! Persevere and persist.
“Go and love someone exactly as they are. And then watch how quickly they transform into the greatest, truest version of themselves. When one feels seen and appreciated in their own essence, one is instantly empowered.”
– Wes Angelozzi
I see myself doing this a hundred times in my day. Why do I do what I do? Why do I work hard and for whom? This big picture is far more valuable and grandiose than our mid-term bonuses, our yearly appraisals, our promotions, and our running-to-the-mill kind of days. And this sort of filtering helps our brain distinguish what can we let go of in the passage of time and what buttress should we hold on to.
All this will take time. To train your muscles takes time. Our growing up takes time. Our kids take time and our careers take time.
All in all, we take time. And time nurtures love. It nurtures our ability to expand more and more. It keeps us stronger and eventually every weight in love is lighter than before. And time will become that scale where we become either stronger to lift a mountain of love or just be drowning in the garbage of self-pity. Because even a pile of garbage has its weight with all its stinky mustiness and filth.
Everything has a weight.
The weight of love that you carry now on your shoulders is the only thing that makes you powerful.
Some weights are good.
In the End:
Holding the light by Stuart Kestenbaum
Gather up whatever is
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled
in the waves or fallen
in flames out of the sky,
for it’s not only our
hearts that are broken,
but the heart
of the world as well.
Stitch it back together.Make a place where
the day speaks to the night
and the earth speaks to the sky.
Whether we created God
or God created us
it all comes down to this:
In our imperfect world
we are meant to repair
and stitch together
what beauty there is, stitch it
with compassion and wire.
See how everything
we have made gathers
the light inside itself
and overflows? A blessing.
You may have a brilliant week filled with lots of love to begin with!
- Anugrah
Delights of the Ordinary currently is a free publication. Yet it takes me many hours of effort to write and curate it. I may need lots of coffee to keep me going. You can :)
Who am I?
Hi, I am Anugrah. I write Delights of the Ordinary for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone and love for life. My newsletter intersects culture, art, and inner health in our practical 9-5 job space. Feel free to share.
Stumbled on my publication? Explore all my previous editions here. And in case you don’t wish to spend time browsing then complement this post with The Antidote for Self-Doubt, To The Ordinary Woman or read about Decision Fatigue and Our Creative Life.
Hi Anu.... this came so well in time. Much love.
How unfortunate is a man who has never experienced love. Indeed it is not a felling and very difficult to explain. Well written