Love is precious, though many people don’t act as if it were.
For all my adult life, I have sought love, and now I have found it. My definition of “love” might be different from yours – what I have sought is the completeness and serenity which comes when you feel you are not alone, and when you incline in moments of need or want to the same person, naturally.
Zen Buddhism teaches that life is all a journey, there is never a point when you “get there.” Once or twice I have had a feeling of “getting there.” One such moment was while driving from Tucson to Phoenix in March, in a year when the desert was in bloom. I chose to take the back road, the one which passes miles and miles and miles and miles of ugly strip malls, then the Biosphere, then turns left onto a grand plateau with purple mountains in the distance. The natural beauty around me was so astonishingly nuanced and grandiose that I stopped the car, got out and opened myself up to take it all in. Driving in a car, I could not see the tiny flowers. Standing in the open, I could thrill to the scene in its micro- and macro-glory. I wanted to can it and take it with me, but such moments cannot last. Taking a picture of it would have been a sad imitation of its beauty. At that moment, I felt I had gotten there, and hated to leave, acknowledging that glory like this is ephemeral.
In love, I feel I have gotten there now, and I don’t want it to end. It will end one day. One or the other of us will die or sicken. We are in our middle 60’s, so it might be a year from now (or tomorrow), or it might be in 20 years. I cannot live in dread of our parting, so must thrust such dire thoughts from my heart. They are worth noting though.