Thursday, May 21, 2015

Redefining Love, Happiness, and Determination

I did not use to write much about love. As a matter of fact, I did not use to write much about happiness. Love has been nothing but a source of tension, uneasy feelings and challenges for honesty. Perhaps indeed, it was not love which I experienced in the past. I spoke about love, yet did not immerse myself in its wonderfully colorful taste. I convinced myself that it was all about love, but failed to understand its considerable complexity, trapped in its mere illusion without logic. Who cares, nonetheless. Not a creature in this universe possesses the ability to define what love entails or should entail. No one should, in fact, because introducing definitions is comparable to creating boxes and drawing lines among these fluid forms of realities.

But I am still one of those victims and winners of love. The pessimistic side of my brain repeatedly warns me about the risks of love, the collateral damage of love, the danger of love, the pain and the tears and the blood. However, I have in fact been very satisfied with what I have experienced in the past two and a half years; I have been very delightful, thankful, and confident. I no longer face troubles with honesty and intimacy; I trust and I comprehend. In a nutshell, I simply treat love as something practical that demands pragmatism in order to remain sustainable. I am liberated from the old, mystical concept of love associated with sacrifice, goodness, and unnecessary pain. Although not knowing the key to fight infinite randomness of reality, I am certain that I am happy, and wanting nothing more than spending the rest of my life with the person who has ameliorated this concept of love in my head, who has rescued me from the sea of hopelessness.

Perhaps my recent feeling of happiness in regard with love has been what prevents me from producing many intensely emotional, poetic paragraphs. I have been distracted from psychologically torturing myself into thinking about a set of negative scenarios having the likelihood to occur the following day, into staring emptily into the ceilings while being tickled by the aggressively sounding clock, into staying up late and deliberately driving myself sick. My recent experience with love has been great, warm, and comfortable. Certainly I would still break down now and then, still being haunted by the difficulties and obstacles to recover and obtain serenity. Nevertheless, I am no longer in the dark; I am no longer ashamed about being afraid and weak and asking for company; I am no longer forced to alienate myself from pleasure and individuality. That's all; together with that person I have constructed a fresh yet subtle notion of love, referring to a state of reality in which one is naturally and honestly happy, in which one is no longer troubled with loneliness, in which one no longer needs to hide the truth in order to fulfill societal expectations.

As lucky as I am in being part of a comfortable relationship and in enjoying the state of physical, economic, and psychological stability, I have to acknowledge the difficulty of liberating those still obsessed with the mere emphasis of conservatism, the importance of kin, and the glorification of superstition. Certainly I may appear overly confident in pointing my finger to those who either consciously or subconsciously choose to believe in the aforementioned matters. Yet how could one be truly happy by having to continuously appease her families, friends, and eventually societies, while possessing neither the will nor the capacity whatsoever to stand up for the importance of skepticism and - to borrow a term in International Relations - 'self-determination'?

Perhaps the post-modernists are right in suggesting the invalidity of the ancient and particularly the Platonic idea of truth, not only because Plato asserts that the so called truth exists, but also due to the fact that the so called truth, in reality, is socially-constructed and therefore differs depending on time, geography (both are also socially-constructed), and other (uncountable) circumstances, thus preventing us as intellectual creatures to agree on certain collections of thoughts and convictions in regard with things such as - but not limited to - love, happiness and determination. To me, getting to the point of understanding this piece of reality had given me such epiphanic feelings, and more importantly the ability to question those with leverage over defining the truth and disseminating those definitions among societies. If I think carefully, this similarly applies to my new notion of love. Love is no longer something transcendent which only those with strong senses of ideal truths can truly experience and understand, as it should not involve superstition and spirituality. Love should yield a subtle form of empowerment which provides one the liberty to be an individual, to demand and rely on rationality, and lastly - to simply question the various notions of truth.

No matter how rational one can be, he will never be liberated from his emotions; maybe that explains why he experiences and exercises love, and sometimes gets lost and subconsciously drowns himself in it. That has happened to me, and who knows if I will ever encounter that awful experience once more, who knows if I will ever be trapped in the illusion once more, who knows if I will ever be back to the state of loneliness and despair. The uncertainty of life could indeed be infuriating; it, on the other hand, allows one to design his own definitions and parameters in life, but of course he has no absolute autonomy over these decisions, as he possesses no absolute, personal free will - again referring back to the social-constructivist argument. However, at this very moment, knowing that I am aware of all these issues, knowing that I have the limited yet sufficient capability and resources for self-determination, and most importantly knowing the reasons why I am happily in love, is what provides me an enormous amount of relief. Who knows what's going to happen in the following two seconds, five minutes, forty three minutes, five days, five years, and so on - but I do not care, as being aware of this reality calms me more than immortality.