Love isn’t linear

Love isn’t linear. How could it be? It’s nature is to leave you stretched and rattled. It invites you to go places you’d never think to go on your own. On easy days it feels like adventure, a surprise trip you didn’t see coming. On hard days, it feels like death, like your life is being shaped and directed along lines you didn’t pick and don’t want. Love won’t deny reality, it faces what is and moves through it. It makes hard turns into the real, walks in the dark, remembers, repeats, whispers, “what is to give light must endure burning (1).” Love doesn’t fix, it follows, it doesn’t cure, it bears pain. Love isn’t interested in pretending, avoiding, keeping things clean, or going back to the good old days. Learning to love is about stepping forward into new territory with a growing, calm, earthy resolve that nothing real or alive unfolds in a straight, predictable line. It’s opening up to a field of play where strange trails and fearsome vulnerability come as standard and often as Monday. It’s seeing your self and others with painful clarity yet remaining present and warm anyway. It’s coming to the end of all that is sexy and hype and realizing that love waits quietly and patiently underneath it all — and, is somehow deeply, surprisingly, profoundly, enough.

(1) Victor Frankl

Soundtrack: Follow You by Imagine Dragons