Infinite

It occurred to me as I considered whether you ever stop loving people, because you break up, because they die, maybe because they are just gone from your life, that you never do stop loving them. Sure, you can get over someone, but how can all those feelings, all that love, just go away? Where would it go?

And then I realized that it doesn't go away. That we are able to continue on, to keep loving, to keep creating love for others. Our love doesn't transfer from one person to the next, it gets created anew. Therefore, we have an infinite amount of love to feel, to give.

This has changed my perspective on a whole lot of things. First of all, it made my past loves feel validated. I was always trying to justify my feelings, thinking I was so infatuated or that I didn't really know what love was at that time. And now I feel like, hey it's ok to have loved that person and no, it didn't work out, but since my ability to love is infinite, I think I'll be ok. It feels great to admit that I was really in love with those people, that my feelings were genuine.

This infinite love stuff has also allowed me to let more love into my life. And why not since love is an amazing feeling and I want as much of it as I can get. I'm not afraid to love someone, a friend, a cat, a cup of coffee, too much because even if I get hurt, I know I have more and more and more love to experience and to give. It's kinda revolutionary in my mind, no longer do I need to feel apologetic about my feelings, I just go ahead and let myself feel it. It's not like allowing yourself to love takes something away from you, in fact it's given me the ability to create even more love.

Yet still I'm caught between knowing this, having these feelings, and not knowing what to do with this information. There's a definite divide in social acceptableness here.

Take my friend "Leo." We met in college and had a great battle of a time defining our relationship because there was a part of me that loved him very deeply, but another part of me that knew he was destined for much greater things than to be my boyfriend. (I know, like there are greater things right?) So I let it go, my dream of our love. Yeah right, that's not quite how I saw things then because I faintly remember clutching to this dream like a starving, caged animal. But hindsight tells me my intuition was pretty good at restraining me from getting involved with him. He now lives very far away, and really is doing pretty great things. But the problem is I still love him. And not in the "I wish we were together," kind of way, but in the "you are such an amazing person and I love everything about you" kind of way. Now you can maybe see how I'm starting to cross the divide here. I'm married, he's in a relationship, and you just aren't supposed to love other people. And you definately can't tell them you love them. So it makes it kinda hard sometimes to have these feelings and well, just have these feelings that aren't shared. So here I am, sharing them. And maybe my husband will read this and wonder where my sanity has run off to and maybe Leo will read it and be a little creeped out, but guess what? I love him anyway, no apologies.

So here is the first word I can add to my definition of love: infinite. So far, I know that love is infinite.